Jun
4
In Praise of Elsevier
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
How do I explain not blogging in May? Too much to do and too little thinking time. I shall try harder. How do I explain the title of this blog? I want to write about people who understand change, and despite the complaints of a vigorous minority of academics and the banshee wailing of the professional OA zealots, Elsevier, from Mendeley to SSRN, can certainly be reckoned to read the directional signs. And have done so over many years – from BioMedNet (memory test for younger readers!) onwards. And the fact that they have always pre-emtively bought in front of the market direction has earnt them no praise from academics (“buying innovation and institutionalising it”) or their conventional competitors (“buying innovation before it has grown real margins at prices we could not have paid”). Since both of these are just what market leaders do in all sorts of markets I imagine that Elsevier management are unmoved: since they have been market leader since they swallowed Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon empire over 20 years ago they have huge experience at being unmoved.
And they have been unmoved in their own peculiar, schizophrenic way. It always seems to me as if two companies struggle inside the corporate cloak. I imagine one as a hugely successful and conservative journal publisher, still defending the ramparts of paid-for journals by crouching in the slit trench of peer review and high impact branded publications. But that of course is just one aspect: the online ideological long march of Elsevier’s techno-Maoists displays quite another. Is there any former publishing company in any information sector who can point to a record of technology application and successful re-investment that matches the story which starts with Science Direct, then goes to Scirus, to Scopus and at length to SciVal. This comprehensive re-assessment of the needs of scientists and researchers for databased content, for advanced search, for consistent abstracting and indexing across the entire industry production, and for evaluation and measurement tools that matched and competed with Web of Science is one of the heroic stories in the awakening of scientific publishing to the digital age and its realities.
Why is this important? Since it now becomes clearer every year that the age of journal publishing has ended, and article publishing itself is becoming deeply commoditised, Elsevier have to conjure up a new company which represents the direction of flow in scholarly communications. In this age of increasing investment in global research, and the importance of publication in the cycle of tenure and gaining research funding, researchers are being set genuine problems in handling the crush of articles and distinguishing what is important. In a data-driven society, with an emphasis on the analysis of results and the repeatability of experimentation, evidential data can be more important to other researchers than the editorial state of the finished article. And with branded journals moving ever closer to selecting offerings from what is already available on pre-print servers and project or institutional repositories, the end-product emphasis changes. And when peer review is post publication in many sectors, another element of the old defensive system falls apart.
But it has not fallen apart yet. And, as ever in the information industry, management find that they have one leg astride the old nag which despite a threadbare appearance still produces revenues and high margins, while the other is across a skittish mare who bucks and plunges in all directions and whose gyrations need more corn to fuel than revenues created from races won. While Wiley, though a good internal innovator, looks more to education for acquisition than STM, and Springer-Nature is hog tied by the need to wait for its IPO, now postponed for a further year, before dreaming of competitive acquisition, Elsevier has the field to itself. Mendeley gave it invaluable data on who is reading what and it is now beginning to exploit the advantage that real data about downloads brings. SSRN brings experience of pre-print servers and the way they work and can be turned into publishing platforms. While Web of Science and the Thomson Science stable is available, an Elsevier bid would probably not survive a competition enquiry in Europe. And anyway, they have built much of that already. And ReserchGate and Academia.edu are clearly buy-able, if one needed to…
The only feasible competitive innovation nexus lies in Macmillan Digital Science (separated from Springer-Nature by the need to exclude their losses from the IPO, though presumably in line to be re-united whenever an IPO is concluded). Here start-ups like ReadCube and figshare are beginning to move powerfully. And F1000 is also presumably available as a play in the post publication peer review and data publishing sectors. But as Elsevier have found several times already in the past 20 years change can come up rapidly from the blind spot in the rear view mirror. In a marketplace now unclothed of its aspirational scholarly lineaments and more nakedly directed by reputation management on the input side, and discoverability and relevance on the output side, the real competitor is not other publishers, but the market itself, its readiness to create co-operative institutions by scholars for scholars, and its willingness to allow Elsevier to co-invest and create margins.
As Elsevier ponders its latest data-mining licences in the context of scientists who want to search an entire scholarly corpus of knowledge in one sweep across all published content, it is as well to rethink the nature of networked communication and outmoded ideas like products, content ownership, IP and “barriers to entry”. In the fashionable metaphor, think of science as a mycelium, a vast, unseen connectivity with the power of such an organism (the largest organisms on Earth) to recreate, innovate and grow from the edge. The Elsevier question may not be old style competition but how much, in the networked service economy of scholarly communication, they will be allowed to do to facilitate the way the network runs and its services function.
Apr
18
With Milton in Fiesole
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
He scarce had ceas’t when the superior Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
. . .
So wrote the poet and so l learnt at school from Paradise Lost that the valley of the Arno was indeed a paradise, and that from the “top of Fesole” you could indeed seek out new lands, on earth as well as the moon. And, a week ago, with the annual Fiesole STM Retreat back at home in that town, courtesy of the wonderful hospitality and organization of Casalini Libri I responded eagerly to an invitation to apply my Optic Glass by way of summing up and closing the meeting.
But you cannot get away with a few genial generalities and then open the Prosecco with these people. This is a rare meeting – a mixed audience of librarians, publishers, scholars and technologists. How Katina Strauch, Becky Lenzini, Ward Shaw and Anthony Watkinson, representing the Charleston side of the agreement that keeps Fiesole’s agenda in shape, manage to do so speaks well of their acute ear for market discordance. The series has now run 18 years and you can see the results – and this year’s slides – at http:digital.caslini.it/retreat/. As an example, look at the pre-conference session on eBooks. Now, what is there left to say about eBooks? Ann Okerson described this session, which she chaired, as as the parable of the blind men and the elephant. And her speakers duly obliged by touching the beast and describing its very different characteristics. Sven Fund saw it as a business with flaws, needing to move the model away from the apparent print parent. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto saw it as an original format underdeveloped, Lauren Schoenthaler of Stanford exposed the legal protection weaknesses while Wolfgang Mayer of Vienna’s massive University was clearly intent on never buying a book again where digital was available. All fascinating, and a reminder that whenever we wish upon the new name of the old, we imprison it in false expectation and limit its development. We should offer a prize for the renaming of the Object formerly known as eBook – especially when they become fully interactive with each other and, as Marvin Minsky once foretold, the books on our shelves really do talk to each
other.
The conference was blessed with two main speakers – Roly Keating of the British Library and Mike Keller of Stanford. Roly has now fully conquered the brief and the plan has wonderful dynamics and is shaping up brilliantly as a sector of the Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter. But how I wish we did not fall into PR-speak in trying to make libraries seem relevant. “Living Knowledge” and “living Science” – to distinguish them from the dead, hidden-in-print versions? Or the work of living as distinct from dead scholars? Or do you need to be alive to visit the British Library? Like Milton’s apparitions, I carried these thoughts into three great sessions on discovery and discoverability. On reputation management, and On new business models. This is one of the few audiences I know which can have a lively discussion on standards, so Todd Carpenter of NISO faced lively questions, while Graham Stone made a strong case for resource discovery tools.
Reputation management really ignites audiences at STM conferences these days. I sense a sub-text, never frankly stated, in which some in the audience are saying to themselves “Is this all it is about – what happened to scholarship?” While others are murmuring “I knew this was the endgame – why not cut to the chase and just create a new index of Scholarly Worth?”. Charlie Rapple of KUDOS and Sara Rouhi of Altmetrics laid out the new territory while Andrea Bonaccorsi of ANVUR, the Italian Research Evaluation Agency, created the framework of need very effectively and charmingly. I have a feeling that we all now recognize the terrain, but I had promised the conference that in my Optic Glass I would fit a new lens suitable to our times. I suggest that, from Snowden to the Panama Papers, the business model we should be applying is the leak. We would get a far shrewder evaluation of scholarly reputation if all the data was known but all the judgements were secret. Then someone could leak the rankings of institutions and individuals onto a website in Kazahkstan, which would demand we all paid attention and made positive contributions to ensuring that ratings were reasonable.
And new business models took us satisfyingly all over the map. Stephen Rhind Tutt deserves a prize for getting data collections into our focus. How we treat and make data available and searchable should be a subject for the 18th agenda. France’s Pinter rightly celebrated the gathering strength of Knowledge Unlatched and Toby Green of OECD described his freemium model in detail – a gloriously left field business model for a very conservative organization, but one which succeeds excellently in adding value and growing revenues for an institution which is bound to release its data free of charge, with excellent topicality we ended with Daniel Schiff describing Thieme’s successful experience of Open Access.
No one on the hill of Fiesole could have used an optic glass without seeing new lands. The new map emerging is no longer journal-centric, and the meaning of Collections is shifting. How we measure the worth of a far more productive scholarly community, and how we effectively map their communications, remains on the dark side of the moon, though community suggests some answers and yet more questions. But there cannot be a better place or a wiser crowd amongst whom to consider the issues.
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