Jun
7
If Its a Service, Outsource It…
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Time to look again at “law publishing”, or whatever it is we call it now. Twenty years ago a wonderfully insightful commentator, Professor Richard Susskind, began the business of redefining the relationship between the processes of the law and the work of law practices. He pointed out with inevitable truth that the things done by law practices were mostly not concerned with decision-making around the meaning and scope of the law: they were usually administrative processes that required little more than high quality oversight, or business and social decisions which lawyers were not uniquely qualified to make. Lawyerly fee structures pre-2007 took little account of where the expertise lay – users were charged by the time elapsed – and charged a lot. As a not very proficient law publisher myself in the 1980s I thought that the law market in regard to the way lawyers worked would never change – and all my contempories assured me that law was a wonderful area for publishers since it never suffered recession and just got richer.
So I followed the Susskind Thesis over the years with a kind of fascination. Having helped with the early acquisitions that built the Thomson Law Empire, it seemed preposterous that the practice of law which supported our efforts. These were the years of investment in “have to have” content and we gloated about the prices we were able to charge to law firms whose margins were such that we never dented their cost base. Yet change seemed inevitable once it became necessary to look at that cost base of law practice and wonder whether cheaper people somewhere else or algorthymic processes managed by third parties might not be the answer to maintaining law practice margins in the first recession ever when lawyers took a hit. I have written here several times about the forces that seemed to me to make it inevitable that Lexis should begin to build practice process software, that Wolters Kluwer in Germany should begin to develop semantic web architecture to create process engines for law practices, or that, true to its innately acquisitive culture, Thomson Law would buy PLC. So you could say that law publishing (and, even more quickly, tax and accountancy publishing) was moving, albeit slowly, to build the sort of workflow service environments that lawyers will need as they move from their traditional posture towards this agile, lower cost service solutions style of business. Most lawyers here in London now agree that a huge proportion of their client services will be outsourced, and most are very wary of the outflanking possibilities of firms like Axiom. This US major plays directly to corporate counsel, using its own law staff to modularize and customize processes and forming an effective back office for even the largest corporates, who formerly gave this work to commercial law practices. Add to this picture the rise of “Tesco law” – the provision for UK legal services to be licensed as a service to the public arm of non-law office activities – and the increase in land title (conveyancing) activity in the British house boom going via licensed conveyancers and not lawyers and you can see why some lawyers feel ever so slightly depressed.
But hold on a minute. If Axiom, who recruited the director running Lexis law practice work, can do it, why not Wolters Kluwer or Thomson or Lexis themselves. They could dis-intermediate, as we used to say in the old days, the lawyers and offer their service solutions directly to the lawyers’ clients. Quickie divorce? Let Thomson do it for you! Problems with statutory filings ? Let Lexis handle it! Of course, there may be small difficulties around holding onto a sustaining revenue flow from the people you are trying to replace while you are trying to replace them. But you could always change your name in the new business and hope that the new play was seen to be “different”. Which brings me to last month’s announcements about Cordery. Cordery Compliance Ltd (http://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/en-uk/media/lexisnexis-uk-launches-cordery.page) is targeted at general counsel in all business verticals. It has ABS status – in other words it is licensed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in the UK to run a compliance business “combining content technology and advisory services”. It has recruited Jonathan Armstrong, formerly a partner in the London office of the US law firm Duane Morris to act as CEO. And is this another independent start up like Axiom? No, it is owned by LexisNexis.
Not of course that this is entirely unprecedented. Thomson bought Pangea3 (http://www.pangea3.com/news-events/press-releases.html) some years ago, though any organization that issues two press releases a year hardly seems very high profile to me. But they are certainly into automated document handling systems and services, though for Thomson Reuters as a whole it may be that the big push came in compliance, with the launch of their Accelus Suite of software, now recently presenting itself with WorldCheck fully on board. The so called “big” data surge and the increasing emphasis on compliance in all its many forms speeds the way. Outsourcing law and tax practises expect very smart technical solutions: having removed their traditional high staff to client ratio they want answers which still leave them with a saving, but which also promise better solutions for their clients. And increasingly they will want to go to one source for complete solutions. The relaunch of PR Newswire’s long-standing document filing system, Vintage Filings (http://www.thevintagegroup.com/), as Vintage last week is a reminder of this – compliance needs to be seen in the round and not just as a series of niche service offerings. But the PR Newswire announcement also shows that very many different types of former content companies are all growing in awareness at the same time: this will be a highly competitive space, it may be easier to start with a clean sheet of paper like Axiom, and it is certainly not true that former law publishers have a right to this emerging market space.
As in the database service developments in law publishing in the late 1970s (Lexis, Westlaw, Kluwer etc), publishers will agonize about how and particularly when to react. In the law market last year people like me were writing about the acquisition of BNA by Bloomberg and the possibility of a new third force in law publishing. Today, it looks as if by the time that third force consolidates, it will be competing in declining markets for law texts and book and newsletter style publishing. When Bloomberg Law/BNA steams into the station to supplant Lexis, that company and Thomson may already have left for a new destination from a different platform. In law, as in education and in B2B in recent years, the cry goes out to acquisition teams – “please do not buy any more books or magazines or newsletters!”
Feb
3
Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay)
Filed Under data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I have longed to write that headline for 30 years, and now Twitter and the Scholarly Web have done it for me! Go to https://AcademicsSay and you will see what I mean. Stuff, not that other stuff, you understand (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/the-scholarly-web-30-january-2014/2010843.article explains everything). Appropriately for Twitter, this new service organized something very topical: the Six Word Peer Review. Some items truly representative of academic (and all) our states of mind emerged. I liked “Why didn’t I think of this”, for example, and “Your data contradict my theory Reject” has the right touch to become a classic, while THES observes the accurate truth of an astronomer whose contribution was “Cite Me Cite ME Cite Me”.
Elsewhere the calm waters of academe were less disturbed, though it seems to me to have been another momentous week for STM announcements. As an indicator of change this interview with Duke University about using articles instead of textbooks seems to me to have real resonance (thanks to Adam Hodgkin of Exact Editions):
http://blogs.plos.org/blog/2014/02/03/an-interview-with-david-johnston/#.Uu-yjhoXJFo.twitter:
“Students are asked to read open access journal articles that cover the main aspects taught in the course. In this case we have focused on using PLOS ONE articles that are now all collected into the Marine Megafauna Collection over at PLOS Collections. We have also developed an iPad app that is useful for teaching marine megafauna-based classes called Cachalot. This app, available on the iTunes store for free, incorporates the PLOS ONE articles with other content written by experts around the world and is released under an open access license. We are not using the app directly in the online class this time as it is only available on iOS, not through the android or web-based platforms – yet.”
So whatever we think about the ongoing debate in scholarly communications concerning the limited impact of OA in research, we may be looking at much greater impact in Higher Education. How ironic would it be if the real impact of OA was on textbook publishers and not on journal publishers. And how equally ironic it would be if the journal research publishers, so long the butt of academic malice, were able to flex their business models and go into fresh territory just as pressure mounts on the journal as the first instance, first peer review point of publication. Macmillan, through their Digital Science subsidiary, have long been the laboratory of experimentation in software and services for supporting research workflow, which I would broadly argue is the direction of progress for those who wish to escape the self-publishing, post-publication peer review which is to follow (flood metaphors come easily in the UK this month). Each to his own Ark, say I, but I am very interested that two large and historically traditional players have chosen Macmillan Digital Sciences vessels this week. I was impressed in the first instance by the Taylor and Francis decision to adopt figshare. Putting all of the evidential data, videos, tabular matter, graphs, filesets and datasets for each T&F article onto figshare immediately gives T&F authors a clickable link that they and their readers can use in T&F Online, but it also creates a new route to the online service, and a new source of metrics. Each figshare entry has a Datacite DOI so that the evidential material can be cited in its own right. This is a practical step which puts users first.
This new service went live on 30 January, as Springer were consummating another deal with the Macmillan Digital Science people (http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-6-1453458-0)
“Whereas altmetrics were used in the past at Springer for annual journal reports and editorial board meetings, or to track a journal’s performance, now this information is being gathered and shared widely with authors, SpringerLink users and the general public as well,” commented Martijn Roelandse, Senior Editor at Springer. “Springer is always trying to find new ways that it can make SpringerLink and the research we publish more useful, and partnering with Altmetric to provide this data fits perfectly with that mission.” Altmetric said:
“Providing this information on SpringerLink to readers, researchers and the general public is a great way of showcasing the wider impact and influence of each article, which is increasingly important to scientists everywhere.”
The number of shares for any given article will now be listed alongside citations on articles’ abstract pages on SpringerLink. While the “citations” link will redirect users to springer.com, the “shares” link will send users to Altmetric (altmetric.com)where they can dive into the discussions around any given piece of research.”
So in the space of a few days two major players indicated that they could no longer withstand the pressure to provide data for articles and data about articles. And at the same time the traditional provider of services to researcher/authors and to information about impact also gave notice of changes to come. First Thomson Reuters made a major announcement about the renewal of Web of Science. In its tug of war with Elsevier SciVal, doing nothing at this point clearly spells disaster, so we find the emergence of a next generation strategy that embraces further development of the landmark agreement with Google Scholar, the provision of the Chinese Science Citation Database and of SciELO (citation data from Spanish and Portuguese language sources) will help, with the Korean database to come. Google means going Open Web, and that helps too. Users who have complained about delays in Open Access article coverage will be pleased to see that being addressed as well.
Yet for many watchers the most interesting Thomson Reuters announcement of the year so far came on 31 January, with the launch of Pro-View eReader Platform 1.8. While it feels to me as if ProView has been around a long time, I recognize that this may be because of an in-bred scepticism that the eBook is the answer, rather than a very transitory step towards an answer. But I have never seen a giant publisher do something like this: an eReader, globally available, Windows and Mac, iPad and Android, capable of importing ebook content from any Thomson (law, tax, science, finance etc) source along with the requisite productivity tools. Users can filter and search notes, highlights, bookmarks; they can move those elements into new editions, even where the text changes; and of course they can create and export PDFs of their own. And you can get this app in any/either Appstore. Seems to me like one of those changes where we all scratch our heads and say “Wonder how we got by without doing this already!” (http://thomsonreuters.com/proview)
A long week of many announcements and rather too many publishing press releases. Come to think of it, we might post some of them at “Shit Publishers Say”. Could be wildly popular on Twitter.
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