Apr
5
STM : Rebirth of a Marketplace
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
” Next Week in Harrogate ” . Sounds like a new wave movie or a British attempt at Scandi Noir crime fiction ? In fact it is the annual meeting of the UK Serials Group , guardians of the lamp of scientific journals publishing , as users and producers ,in this country . This is a segment of what was once called ” the cash cow ” that supported mighty publishing brands from Bertelsmann ( former owners of Springer ) to Wiley , from Thomson ( former owners of Chapman and Hall et al) to Informa ( Taylor and Francis ) , and , pre-eminently , the great Reed Elsevier organization as well as a host of institutions and societies , Royal and otherwise . Many a tear has been shed at the graveside of this industry already , not least in this column , so it is not my purpose to repeat all that – but simply to mark a moment , last week , which we will recall as a landmark , and which should be in the front of our minds on the road North to Yorkshire’s neoclassical city of the moors .
I have boringly prophesied the arrival of the Gates Foundation as a publisher so many times during the Open Access years that I was about to do so again semi-automatically when speaking in the opening Plenary next Monday . But then , gentle reader , it Happened! It was not hard to predict : there was always going to be a point when the cost of publishing Open Access articles in terms of APCs ( author fees ) would grow to a point where it was cheaper for larger funding bodies to do it for themselves . I am a little surprized that we are there already , but since , reportedly , Gates will be using the F1000 publishing mechanism already used by Wellcome , it may have seemed opportune to move quicker and before the cost of Open Access in terms of fees breached the billion dollar point widely seen as the signal for mass change .
But I remain fascinated that it was not , as we were all assured for a decade that it would be , Open Access of itself that did the damage . I see this as part of a wider drive to self-publishing , with post-publication peer review becoming ever easier and reputational judgement gathering in post-publication performance amongst the range of altmetrics that now become hugely influential in creating opinion around the value of research . And as publication in a timely manner outweighed waiting to appear in print within a discipline or domain branded vehicle , and discoverability made online anywhere as visible as a publisher’s database , the pressure to get it out and get it noticed outweighs most other urges , and sharpens the point of people investing in pre-print servers .
And I am sure there will be an aftermarket . And some journals have a long life to go , even if they become re-publishers ( Our Editorial Pick …the best of XYZ in 2017 etc) . But I wonder if the article itself , in its present form , is not the next point of rapid change . In other industries it has proved most constructive to concentrate in digital terms on the workflow , and it is noteworthy that very many publishers , commercial and otherwise , have spent a huge amount in providing ” self-publish to this platform ” software , whereas it might have been just as loyalty-productive , even if not fitting the publisher cost-reduction model , to invite researchers to join their community and then publish anywhere – which is of course exactly what Academia and ResearchGate will do as they develop as publishers . The bottom line here is simple . There is no barrier to entry any longer provided by the technical processes of publishing or by the former necessity for peer review . And the business of organizing content for consumption by librarians and researchers becomes increasingly problematical .
So we turn back to that researcher workflow and ask again how we can support the research process – and we find howling gaps in the provision of services . I have always admired the attitude of Kudos on sticking to the knitting of researcher existence – driven always by winning research grants and gaining or maintaining tenure . And I rejoiced in their latest survey , released this week ( https://blog.growkudos.com )which shows that while most researchers respect and acknowledge the importance of copyright , over 60% admitted that they put their stuff on social networks and give it away in defiance of any publisher copyright instructions . What , give it away in the hope of it coming to the notice of a new research team or the faculty I want to join despite my publishers instructions ? Unbelievable !
In the list at the front of this note you will have seen that many great corporations in publishing are “former ” owners of STM assets . This will speed up as the market gets more difficult and the pressures of users grow . How much longer , for example , will the great subscription services like ScienceDirect and Springer Link be able to lurk on the dark web , demanding subscriber only access , and not conforming to common principles of access for licensed data-mining ? Publishers can and do raise value – a good example this week was Karger’s agreement with UNSILO to add value though machine learning and AI to specific biomedical services .Yet these service improvements are like a rising tide , and the next generation of researchers readily assume that this is the norm for content presentation .
So the Journal will go and the Article will change , but a wonderful marketplace still remains for those willing to discover how researchers work , and and how to save them time and cost and improve their productivity . Digital Science and its peers are already deeply into this , but I still see areas that are relatively unsupported . When playing a role in bringing BioRATH to Digital Science some years ago , I spent time researching regulatory compliance in science research . Now many of the industries I looked at have moved beyond compliance – to competency . Not just to are these scientists storing the chemicals correctly and properly feeding the lab animals – but to does this team have the right components , the qualifications , the experience , the leadership , to accomplish its goals . While scientific researching funding is not diminishing globally , our expectations of results and our need to test there foundations has developed enormously . Is competancy the next reputation ? Interested in any of this ? See you in Harrogate !
Mar
8
The Brexit Upside?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, data analytics, data protection, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
With friends and colleagues in the industry I have been looking at formulating a debate to be held in November this year on the post-Brexit regulatory scenario for the information industry in the UK. I find myself in a quandary, and since it is the spirit of our age, I intend to share the problem with you, in search of therapy if not solutions.
First, some positioning confessional. I am a passionate European free trader. Left to myself, when the Great Repeal Act takes place after 2019, and all the existing regulation of the information marketplace is confirmed as part of the body of UK law, I would like to shut the book and leave it there. Furthermore, I believe that it is vital to facilitating free trade that regulatory regimes between trading nations are as equal as possible so that regulatory barriers and compliance requirements are diminished. In dear old EU days we called this “harmonisation”. I argue from this that if the EU, our largest trading partners, make further changes in their laws on intellectual property ownership or data protection, as examples, then we would do well to reflect those changes in our own legal infrastructure in order not to create fresh hurdles for those creating pan European information products and services. After all, would a sensibly organized European car industry deliberately introduce variable left or right hand drive regimes in one continent?
So my natural answer would be to the policy wonks and regulation nerds – leave everything alone! Yet I know that pressures will come from all sides of the commercial and political arena for post-Brexit change, and this will be quicker to effect in the unitary authority of the Disuited Kingdom than ever it was in the 28 nation veto-fest of the EU. And here are some of the “opportunities” for change that are currently in the wind for post Brexit debate:
1. COPYRIGHT Copyright law in the UK bears all the marks of 43 years of EU membership. EU law is based firmly on the protection of creative acts and the recognition of the rights of creators to determine how their creativity is used. UK law had, pre-EU, moved strongly to protect the economic rights associated with creativity -“the sweat of the brow” – (lawyers – please forgive the level of generalisation!). Many of us lobbied hard and long and successfully to restore the balance with the little used Directive on the Legal Protection of Databases, which creates an ownership in the acts of collation and arrangement of data in a database, whether or not the data concerned where themselves wholly or partially protected by copyright. Others still seek a Publishers Right, akin to the rights enjoyed by record companies, which protects the act of getting the work published in the first place, distinct from any other rights enjoyed by authors. Obviously, plastic Brexit lobbying could see a stronger lurch in what is a very British direction.
2. DATA PRIVACY AND PROTECTION Europe has one of the strongest data regulation regimes in the world. It centres on the privacy of personal data and is highly restrictive in terms of the accumulation and storage of data on people in marketing services and solutions. The signs from current proposals in Europe are that the regulatory burden on suppliers in this sector is likely to become more onerous rather than less. At the same time, the existing ways of equating data regimes across the Atlantic – from Safe Harbor to Privacy Shield are now themselves exhausted, and the UK will not be at the table when Europe and the USA next negotiate trade barriers in this increasingly vital area.
I still say “stay anchored to the trading blocs you depend upon and follow the European route”. And here is the other argument:
3. SCENARIO Post Brexit suggests an opportunity for the UK to really grow its place in global information supply. Through tax breaks on data storage, data assembly and start-ups in the sector the UK could punch well above its weight IF it had
– a “sweat of the brow” copyright regime that fully protected acts of data assembly and service and solution creation.
– a safe harbor regime that allowed third party creation of data services using personal data offshore, with only the services and solutions, not the personal data, being capable of re-export to the countries from which the personal data derived.
– a protection regime like the Dublin financial services Freeport which defined the tax status of these operations.
– an English-language bias that turned the UK into a software and service development outsource, especially tuned to serving European customers as a route to global markets.
And there are wilder ideas – to quote a colleague “Why should Kazakstan have all the good tunes – we could be the offshore pirate radio of data services, hosting everything the world wants, including SciHub!”.
Enough! I am still in the free trader camp, but I invite any reader to post here ideas for post-Brexit – or better reasons than mine for staying where we are now.
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