Nov
6
Stop Science Publishing NOW!
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
“What do we want?” “An end to Science Publishing.” “When do we want it?” “Now!” As I finished the account of the revolt by the editors and editorial board of Lingua against Elsevier’s pricing policies (www.insidehighered.com/news) and the interesting blog by Martin Haspelmath on diamond open access (Free Science Blog 28 Oct-5 Nov), I heard, in my mind’s eye, the sound of these junior researchers marching outside of the Amsterdam office of Elsevier in November 2020 – or sooner! Has it really come to this? And why now?
In all changes associated with digital communications networks, one profile is very marked and certain. Change happens gradually, imperceptibly, until you reach the so-called tipping point. Then it goes suddenly, violently, and way beyond the ability of its promoters to control it. So is that going to happen in science journal publishing? Or will the need for science journal publishing itself have changed before we decide that publishers are dodos? Those who are confident that the great houses will outlast us all are still using the “never” word, which terrifies me. In every digital marketplace I have worked in those who said “never” about format and business model change went out of business, and while they were very effective yellow pages or local newspaper publishers they grossly underestimated the post tipping point slide.
For a long time, almost it seems since Stevan Harnad was an apple-cheeked youth, business strategists in STM have asked people like me whether Open Access would ruin everything. And I always said “no”, reasoning that other things would happen to ruin everything if they did not try to build new businesses alongside the irresistible margins of Big Deal bundling. Those new businesses, based on the workflow of researchers, needed to address easing and simplifying of scholarly communications. If the issues were about data access then publishers could invest in data availability to provide an evidential basis for published research. If the issues were about speed to market, then publishers could build a fastrack. If the issues were about cross-searching and data-mining, then publishers would have to make it easy to search across their article databases through co-operation.
And this raises another issue about digital marketplaces. Traditional suppliers cease to be competitors – the ultimate competitor is always the ability of the customer to do things better for himself. Thus Elsevier, Wiley, Springer-Nature and their smaller peers are no longer competitors, or certainly not in terms of their big branded journals. Those titles are monopolies. At lower levels there is competition for authors, allegedly, and there can be competition for library budgets. Yet in a world where science research spending has grown through recession, and where the market expenditure has a higher share of research team and individual spending than ever before, there is no competitive pressure on price, which is why the Lingua resignations are so interesting. And note that there is not much pressure on costs either, as long as people like Johann Rooryck are prepared to accept a salary of $5500 for the prestigious role of editing the journal (it’s a source of wonderment to me that publishers do not charge academics to be editors …!).
The Lingua people will now do their own thing. LinguOA is now established as a Dutch non-profit trust or stichting, but the idea that sticks with me in this bust up is the role of the funders. The idea, implicit in “diamond OA”, that funders should acquire or become journal publishers – how many APCs do you need to pay before that becomes feasible – is very attractive in terms of some major players – Gates, Wellcome, Max Planck to name but three. Or are aware and sensible publishers already talking to them about doing deals and ensuring that publishers keep their role as a service industry that understands user needs, not the usurped role of deciding the fate of science communication under the guise of maintaining peer review standards.
And the argument does eventually come down to this: who controls the publication decision. In this new age of metrics it is clear to me that the decision about what is good science and what is not has effectively passed into the network domain, and away from editorial boards controlled and paid for by publishers. Peers decide these things by their usage and citation, and as post publication peer review gets more sophisticated we shall get ever better ways of ranking contributions and mapping the state of scientific enquiry. Publishers can help with this – look at F1000, and they can service availability – look at figshare – but they cannot control it. Getting back to the mindset of the 1660s and Henry Oldenburg might be more useful – what can we do to make sure that less worthwhile science is ignored and that the services which researchers use to bring their ideas to the market are as easy to use and offer the best chance of discovery that they can? Publishing is surely a service industry, not a Divine Right! And we need to communicate this to our investors as well!
Jun
30
When Culture eats Strategy…
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
The wise man at the head of the table in a meeting last week reminded me of this old saw. And quite rightly we were discussing academic publishing at the time. And the words came back to me when I saw last week that Springer had acquired the Max Planck Living Review journals and that Maney, with its considerable position in the important Materials Science sector, had sold out to Taylor and Francis. The pressure to consolidate drives both these deals. Both of these large acquirers can use their scale in terms of production and distribution to improve margins here, and manifestly there are not that many interesting acquisition opportunities around. Yet both of these deals display very different characteristics. In my view, it is hugely encouraging to see Taylor and Francis, enjoying the confidence of their new management at the Informa level, investing again in content that they have probably been eyeing for a decade. Cash cows need to be fed and watered like other assets. Yet the age of the quick add-on acquisition are drawing to a close. The major players must look to organic growth, to developing the service cultures that will give them prime sectoral positions with researchers, rather than seeking ever greater volume to thrust into diminishing library budgets.
Viewed from this angle, the Springer deal is the more innovative. Maney was descended from a printer who had moved logically into intellectual property ownership. Living Reviews is based on a research institute making the same move. But there the similarities end, because Living Reviews signals yet another move away from the traditional formats of publishing. The whole idea of having a review article which can be perpetually update and change to reflect changing trends, and always be up to date when you view it, represents a data challenge and an editorial challenge. For Springer to even think of it demands a data environment that allows for rapid new development – an agile publishing environment. The major step taken by Springer to revitalize SpringerLink by recreating it on a MarkLogic platform, is critical to the organic growth strategy because it allows all of the data to be available all of the time for new product development.
We do not know yet whether the Max Planck philosophy of continually evolving review articles will succeed in other disciplines outside of physics, but if it does it will provide a dynamic growth point, and one capable of very high impact factors as theses present “living” reviews have demonstrated in their 15 year history. But what does this imply for the researcher/author – publisher relationship? And what for the idea of the Article and the Journal? In a discussion recently I was very struck by my interlocutor referring to the “Plos 1 journal”. In any sensible world we would by now have cast out the word “journal” and referred to Plos 1 as a database. The only likeness shared by these data elements is that they passed a test of competence in scientific method and procedure. Not only are they not a journal but very many of our never-printed, never-shelved so-called journals should not be referred to using that term. And when, almost two decades ago, I wrote that the Article and not the journal was the true unit of currency in scholarly communication, I was trying to express then the need to re-invent as we move away from any sense of being rooted in a prior print world. So Living Review articles are not articles as print would know them, bounded by time. They are articles as Wikipedia would know them, and we cannot afford to let our old print culture devour our new researcher-facing strategies. But the small sample of interested parties I spoke to last week were less impressed that the Springer acquisition is Open Access and much more interested in talking about speed of update and publication. Funny, that, after all the outrage of the 1990s at slothful publishing producing the goods too slowly, publishing is now much quicker – but, in a network age, still too slow.
So to me the lesson is clear. When we get into the room we use to plan the future, we need to leave the heritage terminology outside of the door. Lets concentrate on researchers and their workflow, and then on how we can improve performance. Mendeley and ReadCube (which notched up another useful win last week) have probably done more in the past five years to make the world of science findable and manageable than anything else. If the future lies in self-publishing with institutional repositories then where is your figshare? Or its successor? The future is not a game that everyone can play, and being Big, while it helps, is not the decisive advantage that it once was. You do really need to have the right culture in order to get into the strategy room in the right frame of mind, and get out with the two vital components – a component of tomorrow and a glimpse of the horizon.
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