Dec
11
Author! Author! Its all about Author-ity!
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Great week to end a year of tumult. While politics is an aberration, the continued development of the electronic publishing networked world is a continuing delight. In a week I found myself starting the new London Info International meeting in the grey hinterland of London Dockland’s ExCel, and ending it speaking in an auditorium in the National Academy of Sciences Keck Centre in Washington DC. And the uniting theme was not for once despair at the prospects of Trump or Brexit. Instead what brought us all together was the advent of an author driven publishing world where self publishing is now the expected reality, and where the reality of toolkits to make acts of sophisticated self-publishing regularly possible is becoming more apparent daily.
Once again academic and research information leads the way, but what is happening there points as ever to wider societal changes. For me, a deeply prejudiced witness, the unifying thesis here is now clearly apparent. As I said in London and repeated in DC, the breakthrough age of Open Access is now past its zenith. This does not mean that it ends anytime soon or that it does not create new growth points in certain disciplines or geographies. It does mean however that the emerging “new normal” becomes getting an article onto a pre-print server, posting it on a repository or exposing it in services like figshare or F1000. Speed is important as is reputation. We lack good ways of underling authorial reputation, which is why services like Kudos are so important. Whether, in a world of post-publication peer review and networked assessment, we are published in a formal journal, open access or not, is becoming irrelevant. Indeed, the real emerging battleground is whether the article is the best way of communicating results, and I expect to see fragmentation around it continuing to grow. From sectors like cell signalling, where data analysis is cited, given a DOI and communicated to HSS disciplines where it remains a standard for posting results, through the many areas of life and social sciences where it is becoming hard to publish an article credibly without releasing evidential data, this pattern of differentiation is becoming obvious. Yet we still conduct discussions using format, ex-print, terms like journal, book and article as if they meant the same in all instances.
My day at London Info International was called “The Rise of the User”, which was hugely appropriate. But of course, the reason why scholarly communications is the first area always impacted by changes to the dynamics of communications is that it is here that the author and the reader are the same people. This is a world of researchers writing for the people that they themselves read. And, more obviously than elsewhere, writing, publishing and communication is an important part of the workflow of scholarship. As we know from B2B markets in particular, that workflow expression is vital. We can know see how the injection of critical information service organization into decision-making environments can have a profound effect on productivity and risk management. This is what we are squaring up to in research.
As we move to become a self-publishing society, we will automate the ways in which we add metadata and build our publishing into the knowledge structure around us. In the foreseeable future the self-publishing professor will add links which expose all of his previous communications, from blogs to books, and which also expose her experience or ranking or reputational data. It will take time for this to evolve, but as I travelled last week between places it was fascinating to see Wiley announcing a new Author Services deal to help authors get into journals, and Cambridge University Press team with Overleaf to do much the same. This is what we should expect as publishers see how far the barriers to self-publishing are diminishing. I have long watched services like www.wearefutureproofs.com work on smart applications for solving one of the bumpy parts of the road – proofreading – on the road to authorial self-relization. Librarians keep telling me how difficult it is to get researchers to engage in publishing tasks without apparently realising how large a part of librarianship in the future will be engagement in publishing support. And at London info International I was able to get some briefing upon www.authorcafe.com, a really interesting attempt to wrap up the whole package for the research team. These are early stages, but this week I have had a strong feeling of the decks being cleared for action.
And what happens in the longer term. All this week I have been repeating my October mantra from the STM conference at Frankfurt. When APCs get onerous enough Funders become publishers (F1000+ Wellcome). My 2027 market leadership forecast, that the biggest players will be IBM Watson Science, concentrating on experimental repeatability through data analytics (did anyone note the significance of the investment by Digital Science in Transcriptic?) and Gates, concentrating on a service defining reputation and trust in research, which I have nicknamed Guru until they oblige by inventing it!) remains on my slide deck. This week audiences were muted in their reactions: stunned that someone should be so dumb, or shocked at all those publishers getting sold or turned into services and solutions providers, I wonder? Thanks for reading me this year, if you have been and joyous festives before facing all-change 2017.
Nov
16
NOAH: The Value in Sliced Salami
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
It has been a strange autumn, from Brexit to Trump, but some continuing strands of human activity give re-assurance that even if the inmates have taken over the asylum, and just about everything else as well, at least some eternal verities remain in place. Arising from a sickbed that had forced me to miss the Charleston librarian’s conference I fumbled my way into the 10th annual NOAH show, anxious to be re-assured on exactly this point. Indeed, I wanted NOAH to rescue me from the Flood!
For those not dutifully attending the Old Billingsgate jamboree during this decade, NOAH, owned and run by the eponymous advisory team, is the premier presentational market for internet start-ups seeking funding or next-stage re-funding. Now joined by a spring offshoot in Berlin, the London show attracts some 2000 financiers who get to hear 10 minute pitches from a different company every 10 minutes for two days from three different stages – and some get to return the favour with pitches for their own funding services. The range is complete – from the impossible to the improbable to tomorrow’s success stories. All you have to do is pick a winner!
Companies are loosely categorised, with presentations in lead generation (still!), marketplaces and classifieds, travel, infrastructure, gaming, The sharing economy, social and dating, travel, logistics, security, finance and insurance, eCommerce, business services, fintech and medtech, to name the more obvious ones. The vast majority of the presentations are around a web services-based world and very many of them reflect the value definitions that we first created in the mid 1990s. These were all about personal productivity and convenience and cost-saving, and whether we could get merchandisers to pay for the value added to the user experience. So, in the context of some of the best presentations that I personally saw, I am perfectly prepared to believe that the German service Casa can help me buy furniture cost-effectively through combining the inventories of over 100 different furniture stores including Ikea, but if I have already made a brand decision then the value becomes a pricing or re-assurance check. Similarly, many will want to use Spottster to ensure that items on their wish lists have not been re-priced and thus brought within range, but the value added requires a determination in the dedicated shopper that only exists in dedicated minorities of populations. We are salami-slicing the value we offer end-users of all types and the result, if we are not careful, will be further marginalisation as markets inevitably consolidate. Increasingly many new service offerings look like add-ons which major players will either hoover up or re-invent in the passage of time. Picking those winners gets that much tougher, which of course raises the importance of NOAH.
And also gives rise to thoughts about where these innovations are going. The commentary online, for example, about AWS as a backward-looking innovation is important. I am not much concerned about whether the plan that Jeff Bezos approved in 2006 was the press release for cloud-based storage, but I am interested in a revival of thinking around value points that leads to the creation of a facilitation that users can then engage with and develop as they will, creating a user drive from an initial value experiment. The user-centricity is the key thing, like the empty chair at every Bezos meeting. So much of the initial web service value was created around this sort of thinking that I wonder why it has not become more important rather than less over time. It is still possible, in certain geographies, to create good service values modelled on things which have succeeded elsewhere – for me, the classic example was the charming food site, Farmy.ch, at NOAH, – but it is really hard to get these things to scale and they tend to be limited by local market conditions.
My prediction therefore would be that shows like NOAH will become much more broadly based in their conception of online innovation. In future years we shall see much more Internet service based development, with blockchain being an immediate focus. Invaluable as the Web may be, adding fresh value gets tougher all the time. Invention should be looking again at the one-to-one and one-to-many possibilities created by global networking; in a future which may well be Web-based but which is not only Web-based, and where the Web may be the service facilitation but not necessarily the service itself. NOAH remains the barometer of these changes, and as I left I could hear the cheerful laughter of investment bankers tinkling into the music of cash registers. How unlike the world outside that day!
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