Jul

19

Hi! Here is Publishing!

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Four minutes ago, Lauren was in the Netherlands on the way to the UK (https://sayhi.co/places/belgium/wetteren). And she is using a new publishing platform called Hi. It may not be the right service in the right vein, but here is as good a place as any to talk about the creative use of the network as a publishing medium. Hi is defined with an Italo Calvino quote: “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corner of the street, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. It enables you to think in two modes, using your smartphone and device to create and extend records of what you have just noticed. The moment sketch is a record in three parts – 20 words, a geolocation and a photo. Then add a sketch (nice beta interface for those like me who think they cannot sketch). Polish it up as an Extended moment, then place it in your Profile. Now sit back and imagine what this tessellated mosaic of sketches and moments will look like when you search on a place, reveal the moments of others, catch a glimpse of realities never before revealed. Here then is a form of travel writing, and a form of poetry, and a form of network expression, and it could be elements of networked fiction. Above all, it is individual expression in a collaborative context. Is it finished? No, it has hardly started and will never finish. But it is art. Or, if you insist, Art.

So does it take us past Twitter? No, it is completely different. This is observation of the mundane as much as the unique. And it is a symptom as much as an answer. It reminds us that the future of entertainment in the network may not be about powerful intermediaries orchestrating things for us, but new tools and platforms allowing us to express ourselves in ways previously impossible. Behind me is a shelf of 32 scrapbooks, in which, for some forty years, I have pasted pictures of houses, paintings, cathedrals and archaeological sites encountered on travels. Apart from the fact that they were attacked by mice one hard winter a few years ago, they have served me well – but how much better if I could now savour them as moments, and easily share them with others. In a recent article on “Big Data” I found the horrifying confession from Netflix that they used advanced data analytics to chart their entry into the production marketplace. Using these technologies, they claimed, allowed them to hone their decision making and allowed them to pick House of Cards as their launch production, bringing 2 million new subscribers in its wake. This is the trouble with success – it brings failure in its wake. Applying data analysis in this way will only ever show what people liked yesterday, and demonstrate that what people say that will like can be in actuality very unstrung from what they eventually discover they do like. The key to data analysis is finding out what it all means. The story of art, on the other hand, is exploring the scope of human expression.

We all know that some things go down well. Narrative works on many different levels. So do images, and location (or do I mean locale?). Many of the services that we create already have precious elements of all of these things. Look at www.fancy.com, which raised over $50 million in second tier funding last week. For luxury goods shoppers, this is almost an art form. It lets them dream aloud, then tells them where its at and what it costs Then look at Relationship Science (wwww.relsci.com), which raised $30 million last month. By interconnecting financiers and managers and ideas users build and explore future business development and funding scenarios – or did I mean to say narratives? So we know that life is art and art is life? So why, if we are so prepared to pursue life in new forms in business or shopping, are we so dubious about moving away from the formats of the Gutenberg world when we engage with the world of publishing. Only a few weeks ago I sat calm and still (disguising inner torment) while the lady who heads a major book publisher here explained to me and the audience that I was addressing that she regarded my criticism of publishers as wrong-headed; her company was a very successful example of digital publishing, since 25% of her sales now came from eBooks.

Fortunately an astute chairman directed us away from confrontation. For me, format shifting is simply moving deckchairs on the digital Titanic. And since the roles of publishers in B2B or STM have changed radically as they encounter the workflow issues of end-users, move away from intermediaries, and become investors in tools and platforms, so it will predictably be for consumer publishers. They will seek to manage the platforms of creativity, like Hi, not the outputs. There will be less of them, and so there should be. What is the point of a world where everyone is his own publisher if someone is trying to own everything?

Jul

1

After The Librarians…?

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Last week’s blog on growing STM sparked some debate, mostly around the realization that if existing powerful publishers who work in research article publishing drive business development towards the workflow of researchers and towards the implications of data analysis and visualization, then current business models may collapse in time – and much else with them. For many publishers this may be expressed as a struggle to “buy time” – prop up the existing business model while culturing the new one. And a part of that culture change is almost never discussed publicly in STM circles. It is the skills changes that will have to take place as publishers (article and journal vendors) have to move from satisfying the generalized, “Big Deal” based procurement requirements of powerful research librarians, library network tsars and institutional information management to coping with the market of many, the precise needs of a researcher, a project or a department. While I have not been to a library-based meeting in over a decade without someone raising the plight of disintermediated librarians, no one seems worried by the idea that the front part of the publishing pantomime horse is innovating in development terms a sequence of product and market shifts that the sales and marketing back legs have no clue how to sell.

This thought struck particularly forcefully this week when I read an article (http://editorsupdate.elsevier.com/issue-39-june-2013/how-to-handle-digital-content/) posted on the Elsevier website on 26 June. Ten years ago I played a brief part as a judge in a competition called The Article of the Future (AotF) organized by Elsevier’s David Marques. Then our aspiration was simply to make the article a born digital environment, not a digitized print artifact. A decade later that is triumphantly achieved, and now the question is the other way about: the article is something which can only exist digitally, and may never again be satisfactorily “printed”. The value in an article, for Elsevier, can only be revealed inside ScienceDirect. The data cursor and interactive plot viewer that enables you to look at the author’s data points will only be available there. Presentation which puts the article in a central pane with a column of navigation on the left and references and tools on the right will be the way to view an article there. Here Kitware SAS have installed a 3D molecular viewer and 3D archaeological viewer – authors upload the model as a supplementary file, and the service then copes with both ribbons and “balls-and-sticks” modelling. A neuroscience 3D imaging package follows.

Then there are the Executable Papers. Just as f1000 has been insisting that data files must accompany articles where relevant, so Elsevier has been experimenting with the journal “Computers & Graphics”. One of the things an article was always intended to do but never managed on paper was to “achieve the full reproducibility of key scientific findings”. Here is a dream of scholarly communication coming closer. Then add some tools: Elsevier show an interactive (Google) map viewer, a chemical compound viewer, interactive phylogenetic trees, and MATLAB figures. And here at last are simple links to connect articles with data held in data repositories, and alongside them links to a PubChem Compound viewer that they have built jointly with the National Center for Biotechnology and Information. Finally, for authors publishing in this AotF format, why not add some AudioSlides? Here, in a voice file with some slides, you can add introduce the concepts and add your own view, outside of the article itself but attached to it, on why this may be important. If article publishing is researcher marketing, this must be a great advance.

So here we have scholarly communication back in the hands of scholars, in the context of wholly digital networked exchanges. With f1000 now creating a logic for post-publication peer review, we can envisage the complete disappearance of the second and third tier journals, with the high brand top journals selecting their articles as post-initial publication edited versions, reflecting some of the feedback and adding more data and supplementary information. In some fields the data and its modelling and the researcher conclusions will stand alone as citable “papers”. The Big Deal argument collapses, as it already threatens to do, into a discussion on database access, and Open Access (more of a threat to librarians than publishers). While publishers use the added value digital article game as a way of bridging the move into workflow markets, they need to know that this is a temporary bridge: in less than five years what seems futuristic today about the Article of the Future will be part of the desktop toolset of every scientist preparing an article for initial publication in his own repository. The emphasis then, and the business of many who call themselves publishers now, will be on selling those tools, creating the services that integrate content in to the context of the research enquiry, enabling the retention and cross-referencing of knowledge, and tracking the benefits – and costs – of lines of research. The race to the Electronic Lab Manual and its successors was never more apparent.

And in this world where are the Research Librarians? One cannot argue with those who point out that important roles of preservation need to be tackled, or that research teams, departments and individuals will all need support and advice. But if those tasks are information management roles within the research team, supported and funded just like the publication of articles, then the infrastructure of buildings and people and budgets surrounding the word “library” may become an anachronism. Publishers who see this as a major release of resources may be tempted to rejoice. Those in sales and marketing who loved the years of brokering “Big Deals” may cry, for the world that beckons requires them to do what every other digital marketplace has had to do, often with limited success: understand the working lives of ultimate end-user customers with an understanding of how they might save time and trouble in the search for greater productivity, better decision making, and improved compliance with research benchmarks and good practise.

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