Jan

14

PPPR: A Black View

Filed Under data protection, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, in “Scraps and Jottings” I tried to reflect, while talking about the newly-launched journal Cureus, an increasing feeling that both traditional publishers and the mujahaddeen of the Open Access world (yes, that good Mullah Harnad and his ilk) are both being overtaken by events. The real democratization which will change this world is popular peer review. Since the Mujahadeen got in and named the routes to Open Access Paradise as Green and Gold, and publishers seem quite happy to work within these definitions, especially if they are gold, I have no choice but to name the Post Publication Peer Review process as the Black Route to Open Access. You read it here first.

This thought is underlined by the announcement, since I wrote my previous piece, that the Faculty of 1000 (F1000Research) service has emerged from its six month beta and can now be considered fully launched. Here we have a fully developed service, dedicated to immediate “publication”, inclusive of all data, totally open and unrestricted in access and enabling thorough and innovative refereeing as soon as the article is available. And the refereeing is open – no secrets of the editorial board here, since all of the reports and commentaries are published in full with the names and affiliations of referees. The F1000Research team report that in the last six months they have covered major research work from very prominent funders – Wellcome, NIH etc – and that they now have 200 leading medical and biological science researchers on their International Advisory panel and more than 1000 experts on the Editorial Board (see http://f1000research.com). And since they have a strategic alliance with figshare, the Macmillan Digital Science company, “publishing” in this instance could be as simple as placing the article in the researcher’s own repository and opening it up within F1000Research. And since othe partners include Dryad and biosharing, the data can also be co-located within specialized data availability services. Saves all those long waits – as soon as it is there, with its data as well, the article is ready to be referenced alongside the academic’s next grant application. The fact that all current publishing has been accompanied by the relevant data release (for which read genomes, spreadsheets, videos, images, software, questionnaires etc) indicates that this too is not the barrier that conventional article publishing made it out to be.

Ah, you will say, the problem here is that the article will not get properly into the referencing system and without a “journal” brand attached to it there will be a tendency to lose it. Well, some months ago Elsevier agreed that Scopus and Embase would carry abstracts of these articles, and, as as I write PubMed has agreed to inclusion once post-publication review has taken place. But then, you will say, these articles will not have the editorial benefits of orthodox journal publishing, or appear in enhanced article formats. Well, nothing prevents a research project or a library licensing Utopia Docs, and nothing inhibits a freelance market of sub-editors selling in services if F1000Research cannot provide them – this is one labour market which is dismally well staffed at present.

Now that F1000Research has reached this point it is hard to see it not move on and begin to influence the stake which conventional publishing has already established in conventional Open Access publishing. And F1000 obviously has interesting development plans of its own: its F1000Trials service is already in place to cover this critical part of bio-medical scholarly communication, and, to my great joy, it has launched F1000Posters, covering a hugely neglected area for those trying to navigate and annotate change and track developments. Alongside Mendeley and the trackability of usage, post-publication review seems to me a further vital step towards deep, long term change in the pattern of making research available. My new year recommendation to heads of STM publishing houses is thus simple: dust off those credit cards, book a table at Pied de Terre, and invite Vitek round for lunch. He has not sold an STM company since BMC, but it looks as if he has done the magic once again.

But, now, I must end on a sad note. The suicide this week of Aaron Swartz, at the age of 26, is a tragic loss. I understand that he will be known as one of the inventors of RSS – and of Reddit – and he had been inventing and hacking since he was 13. PACER/RECAP controversially “liberated” US Common Law to common use. He was known to suffer from severe depression and it appears that he ended his life in a very depressed state. But here is what Cory Doctorow (http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html) had to say about what might have been a contributory factor:

“Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.”

Well, one thing we can be quite certain about. Protecting intellectual property or liberating it cannot ever be worth a single human life.

Jan

4

Practice Makes Research Perfect

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Don’t you love the way that financial analysts run for the cover of the Big Generalization? So Thomson Reuters buying PLC (Practical Law Company) on 3 January is Consolidation. Big getting Bigger. More market share. Problems of law markets in the recession years need to be addressed by bigger content units. Simples? No, not at all. And this form of analysis entirely misses the point. Why did Thomson Reuters need to buy PLC now? Where does it place them in the evolving story of professional services? And what does this acquisition do to their existing services and their positioning in the place where there is growth – small and medium size law practices? In fact, what is this story which may be superficially easy to categorize but actually tells us a very great deal about what is happening to networked services in the professional sphere of activity.

I have written about this in several pieces in the last 3 months (“Beware: Lawyers at Work”, 4 November 2012 and “The Way Lawyers Work Now”, 13 September 2012). I have tried to underline there that this is not a new process. Robert Dow and Chris Millerchip, who founded PLC, left Slaughter and May to do so in 1990. As I recall the story, their very first impetus was to start a magazine which would advise lawyers on practical processing issues in dispatching routine legal matters, and only later did they turn to devising and implementing those pieces of process – precedents, practice notes, checklists, document templates etc – which would dig down deep in key sectors like commercial, corporate, employment, intellectual property, competition or finance law. They now have what the press release describes as a “comprehensive suite” and they do this in the US as well as in the UK. They are universally respected, used by 96% of the UK’s top law firms and 80% of the AmLaw 200, yet at around £50 m in revenue in 2011, surprizingly small. However, they are exceeding profitable, running subscription services which few ever leave (they become part of the way your law firm works), and often quoted as running ebitda returns in the high 30% range. Estimates of their sale price this week were around £300m, arguing 12X a forward ebitda of £25 m. We shall never know, but even these estimates indicate a very valuable company that Reed Elsevier’s Lexis and Thomson Reuter’s Westlaw have sought to buy for years. But they would never pay the founder’s idea of a full price. So why Thomson Reuters and why now?

I have tried to indicate in those previous pieces that Publishers (aka Butterworth or Sweet and Maxwell in 1990) would not have seen what PLC do as  publishing”. And, from the 1970s onwards, big law publishing had invested in the world of Research (which in lawyer terms mean that they were mostly concerned with litigation, always a bigger game in the Us than in the UK). As a result Westlaw and Lexis dominated law library budgets in major law firms globally, but their revenue base was very dependent upon a small base of litigators, and the ability of their costs to be charged through the system to the ultimate client. However, the practise of law is not mostly like that, but rather more like the patient game of form completion and document filing where PLC sought to introduce productivity game. It took a global recession but now the big law publishers get it too. The impressive attempts by Lexis in London to build practice tools and sell more use of research through them bear witness to that: strategy turns through 180 degrees when we realise that we are not in business to simply support and then replace the library, but that we are there to handle the whole business of the law office. This is about productivity gain, better decision-making and cheaper and more effective compliance, this “business of law” thing, and if we can do it for lawyers we can do it for any professionals. As the largest player in Law as Research, Thomson Reuters were the most vulnerable player as the market began to move towards these Business of Law considerations.

But, just a minute, a lot of those future customers in the law office context will not be lawyers. Even lawyers, as polled by Lexis in the UK, see the majority of routine work getting parcelled out to legal services and paralegal services players, both onshore and offshore. And there will also be Expert systems doing some of this work. Law offices will get smaller and more expert, and sell on their expertise alongside and within the workflow that they place with contractors. But how do you ensure quality results – unless the outsourcers use standard precedents and proven workflow modelling from verifiable sources. And what happens when these tools reach medium and smaller practices: quality gets improved and cost competition grows. It is not hard to see the law office and the corporate law/counsel office of the future. It runs on the network, uses work processed by a variety of hands in different places, employs standardized and compliance-approved workflow tools allows users to collaborate in alerting each other to threats or reversals (in the Courts) which may inhibit the utility of some of those processes. Thomson Reuters just joined this world, and not a moment too soon. Some of their thinking and some Lexis minds were there already. But now it is official: Business of Law is the Future of Law.

Two points remain to be made. We have to recall that Messrs Dow and Millerchip left Slaughter and May where they had been working lawyers in search of efficiencies. In other words, they were not the editorial/academic lawyers normally employed by publishers. This says something about the sort of people Thomson Reuters and Lexis will need to employ to get this huge transition right. Then again, one major player is yet to shift. Bloomberg is a private company and what it does is its own business, yet the maintenance of the infant Bloomerg Law separate from Bloomberg BNA is an enigma, as is the apparent indifference in the 12 months since the BNA acquisition towards global markets or these Business of Law issues. Perhaps having to have everything on the Bloomberg box, rather than in cloud/network configuration, has something to do with it. As it is , in contrast to Thomson Reuters and Lexis, Bloomberg’s offering looks a bit off the pace of change. Enough reason, perhaps, for Thomson Reuters to buy PLC in the first place?

Thomson Reuters Press Release: http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/thomson-reuters-to-acquire-practical-law-company-185535352.html

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