Apr

18

With Milton in Fiesole

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

He scarce had ceas’t when the superior Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
. . .

So wrote the poet and so l learnt at school from Paradise Lost that the valley of the Arno was indeed a paradise, and that from the “top of Fesole” you could indeed seek out new lands, on earth as well as the moon. And, a week ago, with the annual Fiesole STM Retreat back at home in that town, courtesy of the wonderful hospitality and organization of Casalini Libri I responded eagerly to an invitation to apply my Optic Glass by way of summing up and closing the meeting.

But you cannot get away with a few genial generalities and then open the Prosecco with these people. This is a rare meeting – a mixed audience of librarians, publishers, scholars and technologists. How Katina Strauch, Becky Lenzini, Ward Shaw and Anthony Watkinson, representing the Charleston side of the agreement that keeps Fiesole’s agenda in shape, manage to do so speaks well of their acute ear for market discordance. The series has now run 18 years and you can see the results – and this year’s slides – at http:digital.caslini.it/retreat/. As an example, look at the pre-conference session on eBooks. Now, what is there left to say about eBooks? Ann Okerson described this session, which she chaired, as as the parable of the blind men and the elephant. And her speakers duly obliged by touching the beast and describing its very different characteristics. Sven Fund saw it as a business with flaws, needing to move the model away from the apparent print parent. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto saw it as an original format underdeveloped, Lauren Schoenthaler of Stanford exposed the legal protection weaknesses while Wolfgang Mayer of Vienna’s massive University was clearly intent on never buying a book again where digital was available. All fascinating, and a reminder that whenever we wish upon the new name of the old, we imprison it in false expectation and limit its development. We should offer a prize for the renaming of the Object formerly known as eBook – especially when they become fully interactive with each other and, as Marvin Minsky once foretold, the books on our shelves really do talk to each
other.

The conference was blessed with two main speakers – Roly Keating of the British Library and Mike Keller of Stanford. Roly has now fully conquered the brief and the plan has wonderful dynamics and is shaping up brilliantly as a sector of the Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter. But how I wish we did not fall into PR-speak in trying to make libraries seem relevant. “Living Knowledge” and “living Science” – to distinguish them from the dead, hidden-in-print versions? Or the work of living as distinct from dead scholars? Or do you need to be alive to visit the British Library? Like Milton’s apparitions, I carried these thoughts into three great sessions on discovery and discoverability. On reputation management, and On new business models. This is one of the few audiences I know which can have a lively discussion on standards, so Todd Carpenter of NISO faced lively questions, while Graham Stone made a strong case for resource discovery tools.

Reputation management really ignites audiences at STM conferences these days. I sense a sub-text, never frankly stated, in which some in the audience are saying to themselves “Is this all it is about – what happened to scholarship?” While others are murmuring “I knew this was the endgame – why not cut to the chase and just create a new index of Scholarly Worth?”. Charlie Rapple of KUDOS and Sara Rouhi of Altmetrics laid out the new territory while Andrea Bonaccorsi of ANVUR, the Italian Research Evaluation Agency, created the framework of need very effectively and charmingly. I have a feeling that we all now recognize the terrain, but I had promised the conference that in my Optic Glass I would fit a new lens suitable to our times. I suggest that, from Snowden to the Panama Papers, the business model we should be applying is the leak. We would get a far shrewder evaluation of scholarly reputation if all the data was known but all the judgements were secret. Then someone could leak the rankings of institutions and individuals onto a website in Kazahkstan, which would demand we all paid attention and made positive contributions to ensuring that ratings were reasonable.

And new business models took us satisfyingly all over the map. Stephen Rhind Tutt deserves a prize for getting data collections into our focus. How we treat and make data available and searchable should be a subject for the 18th agenda. France’s Pinter rightly celebrated the gathering strength of Knowledge Unlatched and Toby Green of OECD described his freemium model in detail – a gloriously left field business model for a very conservative organization, but one which succeeds excellently in adding value and growing revenues for an institution which is bound to release its data free of charge, with excellent topicality we ended with Daniel Schiff describing Thieme’s successful experience of Open Access.

No one on the hill of Fiesole could have used an optic glass without seeing new lands. The new map emerging is no longer journal-centric, and the meaning of Collections is shifting. How we measure the worth of a far more productive scholarly community, and how we effectively map their communications, remains on the dark side of the moon, though community suggests some answers and yet more questions. But there cannot be a better place or a wiser crowd amongst whom to consider the issues.

Jun

30

When Culture eats Strategy…

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

The wise man at the head of the table in a meeting last week reminded me of this old saw. And quite rightly we were discussing academic publishing at the time. And the words came back to me when I saw last week that Springer had acquired the Max Planck Living Review journals and that Maney, with its considerable position in the important Materials Science sector, had sold out to Taylor and Francis. The pressure to consolidate drives both these deals. Both of these large acquirers can use their scale in terms of production and distribution to improve margins here, and manifestly there are not that many interesting acquisition opportunities around. Yet both of these deals display very different characteristics. In my view, it is hugely encouraging to see Taylor and Francis, enjoying the confidence of their new management at the Informa level, investing again in content that they have probably been eyeing for a decade. Cash cows need to be fed and watered like other assets. Yet the age of the quick add-on acquisition are drawing to a close. The major players must look to organic growth, to developing the service cultures that will give them prime sectoral positions with researchers, rather than seeking ever greater volume to thrust into diminishing library budgets.

Viewed from this angle, the Springer deal is the more innovative. Maney was descended from a printer who had moved logically into intellectual property ownership. Living Reviews is based on a research institute making the same move. But there the similarities end, because Living Reviews signals yet another move away from the traditional formats of publishing. The whole idea of having a review article which can be perpetually update and change to reflect changing trends, and always be up to date when you view it, represents a data challenge and an editorial challenge. For Springer to even think of it demands a data environment that allows for rapid new development – an agile publishing environment. The major step taken by Springer to revitalize SpringerLink by recreating it on a MarkLogic platform, is critical to the organic growth strategy because it allows all of the data to be available all of the time for new product development.

We do not know yet whether the Max Planck philosophy of continually evolving review articles will succeed in other disciplines outside of physics, but if it does it will provide a dynamic growth point, and one capable of very high impact factors as theses present “living” reviews have demonstrated in their 15 year history. But what does this imply for the researcher/author – publisher relationship? And what for the idea of the Article and the Journal? In a discussion recently I was very struck by my interlocutor referring to the “Plos 1 journal”. In any sensible world we would by now have cast out the word “journal” and referred to Plos 1 as a database. The only likeness shared by these data elements is that they passed a test of competence in scientific method and procedure. Not only are they not a journal but very many of our never-printed, never-shelved so-called journals should not be referred to using that term. And when, almost two decades ago, I wrote that the Article and not the journal was the true unit of currency in scholarly communication, I was trying to express then the need to re-invent as we move away from any sense of being rooted in a prior print world. So Living Review articles are not articles as print would know them, bounded by time. They are articles as Wikipedia would know them, and we cannot afford to let our old print culture devour our new researcher-facing strategies. But the small sample of interested parties I spoke to last week were less impressed that the Springer acquisition is Open Access and much more interested in talking about speed of update and publication. Funny, that, after all the outrage of the 1990s at slothful publishing producing the goods too slowly, publishing is now much quicker – but, in a network age, still too slow.

So to me the lesson is clear. When we get into the room we use to plan the future, we need to leave the heritage terminology outside of the door. Lets concentrate on researchers and their workflow, and then on how we can improve performance. Mendeley and ReadCube (which notched up another useful win last week) have probably done more in the past five years to make the world of science findable and manageable than anything else. If the future lies in self-publishing with institutional repositories then where is your figshare? Or its successor? The future is not a game that everyone can play, and being Big, while it helps, is not the decisive advantage that it once was. You do really need to have the right culture in order to get into the strategy room in the right frame of mind, and get out with the two vital components – a component of tomorrow and a glimpse of the horizon.

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