May
12
The Deniability of the Blog
Filed Under Blog, eLearning, healthcare, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Back in Germany after a weekend, I find that everything has changed. I am in Gendarmenmarkt and not in Ku’damm, and we are celebrating an end to war on all sides. And I am at the wonderful Fiesole Retreat, out in full strength to once more bring STM publishers, librarians and academics together in a conference small enough for meaningful dialogue, and sufficiently heterodox to throw up thinking that skews the accepted beliefs. In its fifteenth year, it remains a huge credit to its founders, Casalini Libri, to whose bosom it returns next year in Fiesole, and the Charleston conference. This year, in Berlin with the support of the Humboldt University, Walter de Gruyter and Springer, was well up to the high standards of the series.
The speaker of the event, for me, was Anya Smit, the challenging university librarian from Utrecht. Designing a library which will soon be an entirely digital concept, she and her colleagues set aside the format limitations of “book”, or rather reconstruct them so that a blog becomes a “book”. I loved the openness of her approach and her disdain for limitations as to what a library might contain and how it’s knowledge exploration might be bounded. We had, after all, started the meeting quite conventionally with Michael Mabe, in non-confrontational mode, giving a fascinating account of the history of the journal and the article from Henry Oldenburg onwards to celebrate the foundation of the Royal Society Transactions in 1665. In many ways this made an admirable book-end to Anya Smit’s talk, illustrating how completely we have removed ourselves from the age of format and how completely the chain of scholarly communication in a digitally networked world values contributions by impact and timing, and not by process and format.
In many ways Deni Auclair of Outsell hammered this home when she gave a complete analysis of how the STM marketplace is behaving. I am still slightly alarmed by the fact that there is a $10 billion gap between Outsell’s estimated market sizing and the $25 billion revenue base claimed by the STM association of publishers. There is of course bound to be a difference between a measurement of publishing revenues and the information actually bought by customers, given that data sales are so important to research and will arguably become more important. Will we see the journal market continue to grow but diminish in overall terms as a proportion of what it’s market actually buys? And will this be exacerbated by the impact of Open Access? Deni pointed to the relative lack of impact of OA on publisher revenues, less than 1% of which were derived from author publication fees. Given that publishers were the recipients of prophecies of doom and extinction from OA fundamentalists like Professor Stevan Harnad some years back , I had the temerity to tweet this at #fiesoleretreat15, wondering if that great warrior was prepared to acknowledge predictions unmet. I had the reply immediately: “umm, where did I predict OA by (any date)?-Did say it could be provided overnight, was greatly overdue, optimal, and inevitable”. Which demonstrates both the glories of the global conferencing of Twitter and my need to apologise to the Professor. I clearly misunderstood him to mean that it was coming before it was overtaken by other inevitabilities like the death of the journal, the end of the article and the decay of peer review!
The polar opposite of the feisty Professor might well be Derk Haank, now CEO of Springer, who gave the evening session at the conference. Bursting with energy and confidence after launching the new name of the merged company earlier in the day (apparently it could not have been Nature-Springer since the resulting initials would have been unacceptable in Germany!), he roundly declared that the tasks ahead were nothing for a team which had made Elsevier likeable to the academic community. And even more gratifying was his promise, addressed directly to this blogger over the heads of his audience, that he was not going to retire any time soon, and certainly not when the IPO of Springer-Nature takes place.
Now did I ever say that? Or is it subject to the retrospective Harnad rules of recall? For all I know I wrote a blog on the Bush-Blair initiative in Iraq as a humanitarian gesture, or one on How Labour really won the 2015 UK election. Historians in the archives of the Utrecht university library will have to sort it out. My hope is that neither Professor Harnad or Derk Haank retire. They are far too entertaining in a grey world to be spared but if they could be persuaded to do an Open Access start-up together….
May
4
A Stroll in the Tiergarten
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
It was almost May. The asparagus is just arriving and the rhubarb at its best. This can only be the backdrop for the annual Publishers Forum in Berlin, now celebrating its 12th year and consistently performing as the focus for publishing discussion in central Europe, and celebrating the global view Europeans now take of publishing in all its forms and marketplaces. This show is put on by Klopotek for the industry it serves, which is a service that its industry should appreciate With some 260 delegates from Germany and central Europe, that appreciation certainly seems to be in place. This year’s theme “How to Reconstruct Publishing: Competing Visions, Channels and Audiences”, was the first under the direction of Dr Ruediger Wischenbart, but was as typically challenging as ever. A real debate about where we are going is still hard to find.
In a typically stirring piece in Scholarly Kitchen this week Joe Esposito (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/04/the-half-life-of-print/) made the point that whenever we debate the future of publishing someone stands up and asks about the future of the book. I agree with him, and I find this as annoying and pointless as he does. Quite apart from the fact that print has disappeared in very many contexts in society, the digitally networked world releases us from this fruitless debate by the promise of being able to deliver anything to anyone at the point of use in their preferred medium. Ergo, print will survive where people value it and disapear entirely where they do not – yellow pages, trade maggazines, academic journals, newspapers…? Well, you see what I mean. Joe makes the point that digital publishing has not yet been kind to coffee table artbooks, so I was interested to hear Rolf Grisebach, CEO at Thames and Hudson, give one of the opening keynotes in Berlin.
His not-unreasonable argument turned on the large file size and lack of a decisive advantage in image viewing that digital currently offers users of art books. In last weeks’ piece in this place I pointed to the virtual reality benefits of displaying architecture online, as practiced by the New York Times. I would like art publishing that allowed me to focus on the eyes of the artist and then move me through a slide show of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in chronological order. I would like a virtual reality tour of Christopher Wren. I have the Waste Land app on my iPad and I am a customer for new approaches to valuing art, literature, architecture and music in a digital age. Here I think we can do more, though I was very grateful to Rolf for re-awakening memories of his company founder, Walter Neurath, and for reminding me that the company is named for its two founding cities, London and New York.
In some ways there was more comfort for the progressives in the next keynote, from Jacob Dalborg, the CEO of Bonnier Books. Here was an integrated vision which sounded like an investible business plan on the one hand, while stressing the way the digital world makes marketing to niches more potentially profitable than ever before. Any session that hammers home the need to build and exploit metadata and expand metadata values must be of prime importance today. With global standard expertise on the agenda (Graham Bell, Director of Editeur) this conference could hardly be accused of ducking the issue, but I still feel that we see this as “marketing utilities” and it always gets sidelined when we talk “creativity”. Well, if you want to create markets there is no more important subject, and it was good to see Jacob Dalborg underlining it.
This conference does bilingual brilliantly, but it also does breakout sessions that create wonderful debate but mean I lose some agenda items. Thus I really wanted to hear Publishing goes Pop: instead I moderated a session with a small group in which a very valuable discussion took place. Across the table was an Open Access STM publisher from Poland and a consumer publishing marketing executive from Germany. The others at the table were left to listen as these two set out to demonstrate the parallels in their very different specialities and effectively draw together the themes of the conference. This was the antidote to any idea that publishing is pulling apart. Indeed, at the end of this I was convinced that the digital network is helping publishing of all types re-focus on the user, and services to the user, in a way that in the world of physically formatted publishing we could only pay lip service.
And of course we had some technology, but it is now noticeable that we do not talk “tech” to these audiences at all. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic, talks about flexibility, about speed of new product generation, and, in this agenda, putting content and context into action. It remains a surprize to many of us that publishers seem to set so much value on creative content, understandably, while according such reduced value to the contextual data about customers and how they use content in general, and their own content in particular. Meanwhile, Steve Odart of IXXUS moved us into a consideration of how we run our businesses and how we innovate when he took the Agile project management philosophy away from tech and into business as a way of working creatively in digital marketplaces.
Two days and we did not even get a stroll in the park – though perhaps that was what we enjoyed in the sort of company which is thinking seriously, not about the book, but about where publishing goes now.
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