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!
Oct
27
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am searching for an excuse for the break in sequence on this blog. Travel in the US and Europe, falling over in Frankfurt (loss of dignity more than loss of blogging time), Rugby World Cup, the slow feet of age – take your pick of excuses, but one thing I cannot blame is lack of material. I have a stack of it left over from the summer, so perhaps it is the very volume that has intimidated me.
We have to start somewhere so lets start with Events. Of all the sectors that I cover it is the one most exposed to digital disruption potentially, and the one where existing players huddle because they mistakenly believe that it is the most resistant to digital market impact. However, it is now possible to see signs of greater niche specialization going forward, and a recombination of events with digital services. Yet you seldom see signs of the sort of intensive digital exhaust data re-use that people like me predicted five years ago. In M&A terms the sector commands high multiples, understandably, because of its cash generation and margins profile, but also, I suspect, because of this “safe haven” characteristic. And because many participants thought they were the last inheritors of the the Lost World of Advertising. In fact, though, one could argue that events should be more profitable, and that vertical specialization will root them into all other sector services and solutions.
So I was really interested to see Comexposium buy the Digital Marketing division of DMGT (dmg events). Dmg events has always been an area of difficulty for DMGT – starting with great consumer show assets like Ideal Homes was not the ideal entry point for a company whose thrust is now determindly B2B, and as the events division re-formed around the new direction dmg events certainly did not mirror the successful investment path in areas like land and property in B2B. Meanwhile other operating units like Euromoney developed their own events independently.
This is not to say that dmg events did not make a real contribution in its best years. However, refining and concentrating the portfolio, even if it means getting out of the digital marketing sector, seems like the market mood at present. And for Comexposium, who have Mobile Media Summit, Digital Marketing One to One, and E-Commerce already, adding the ad:tech, iMedia and Digital Collective shows makes a great deal of sense. And, as is increasingly the case with these portfolio re-organizations, we are talking about global coverage in a niche which is both global and local. And immediately it becomes clear, to me at least, that the risk element here is far greater than participants who believe they are working at the “safe” end of B2B currently suppose.
Though it has gone quiet, there is no reason to suppose that UBM is not still trying to sell PR Newswire, even if it does not make the sale with Cision. Those resources, set to work on sorting the UBM events portfolio, could make a great difference. There is plenty in the market to buy, and, as Informa demonstrated with Hanley Wood, even niche players will sell their events portfolio if the price is right. There is obvious tension between the view that you can always hold onto you community and start again, and the view that people always return to old stamping grounds (the Frankfurt that felled me this year was my 48th). But I sometimes feel that the sort of analysis that goes into risk of deterioration in event quality starts on a far too simplistic level. And every time a “fad” passes across the face of the marketplace there is a risk that market players will think that something has come and gone, that they are somehow safe from that particular risk. Yet the lesson of digital marketplaces is that everything that appears to have “failed” then recurs, in another guise and stronger ever than before.
“Community” was all the rage 5 years ago , as we sought to apply a new generation of eCommerce tools to service environments. Then we became avid data collectors, trying to capture every keystroke of our user connectivity in order to second guess user predilections. Now we sit squarely in the world of inaptly-named Big Data, and I really wonder why some of the heat seems to have gone out of the game of using events-derived data as a way of refocussing the whole information services and solutions approach to B2B. Where else in the cycle do you have users who are identifiable and trackable, whose event cycle can reveal concerns and interests and who can be plugged into intelligent systems both to optimize their event time and to develop other, customized service shells on their instruction. The potential for using events to rebase a services marketplace is so great, in my view, that if you own a data business and have no aligned event, or own an event and are not developing an aligned data business then you are in a position of strategic peril.
In the world I envision Reed Expo and RBI will join back together and refocus, EMAP will wonder why it ever thought it could sell its events without its data services in aligned packages, and data players will scout the events start-up potential of their holdings. When I last said this, to the 80th UFI Congress in Seoul in 2013, I received kind but inscrutable smiles. In the two years that have passed since then my confidence has risen almost as steadily as the valuations of key events.
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