Oct
1
PlanS: Does Publishing have a Plan B?
Filed Under Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, machine learning, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Plan S was greeted with widespread and intense… silence in the publishing industry. Part of the reaction was governed by the need for rapid analysis to see what it might actually mean. Part of it was sheer disbelief – are taxpayer funded research institutions going to be allowed to create policy which they think is in the interests of science, not business? Listening to a lobbyist tackling an industry minister on this topic this week, I had a distinct impression that if the perception of funders is that PlanS is good for science, it will be very hard for commercial interests to change the the climate of opinion. Nor, I think, will the argument that I have seen from Joe Esposito and others that making it a condition of funding that researchers publish in non-hybrid journals is a major attack on freedom of expression and scholarly independence carry much weight in Europe, even if it has more resonance in the USA. A funding body that says it is using taxpayers money responsibly when it ensures that the outcomes of research are known to the greatest number of taxpayers who funded it and at the least additional cost surely trumps (sorry about that) the commercial sector’s hand. While there must be scope for arguing funders into a slower pace – the plan to have this fully effected by January 2020 may be in place as much as anything to concentrate people’s minds – I have little doubt that the attack on hybrid journals is real and will succeed unless direct political action stops it. This is not however an issue that creates electoral movement, and the political agendas of Europe are pretty full of other things.
So what does it mean if PlanS succeeds? Matthew Walker, the very knowledgeable analyst at Credit Suisse, points out that the potential effects on two quoted companies that he follows closely are limited. At RELX and at Informa, 4% and 2.5% of gross revenues derive from UK/Europe journal subscription revenues. He calculates that at the group operating profit level, the impact could be 5% and 2.5% respectively. The fact that share prices in both companies have fallen 10% since the summer (H1), and that these falls discount this effect somewhat is the shorter. The longer term thought of the EU with $14 bn in research funds following PlanS, as well as Wellcome and Gates, sharpens the impact. Even if we concede that it will take longer and the big players will find a degree of mitigation, the most immediate effects will be felt not where PlanS intended, but amongst scholarly societies and institutions. For many of these this could be a disaster. The enlightened few , like the Royal Society of Chemistry, are out there promulgating new business models like Read and Publish. They scored a notable success outside of the UK by engaging MIT in this last month. But this is still hybridity by another name. If you are a scholarly society and the whole organisational structure is based around funding derived from journal subscription revenues, PlanS is a threat of potential extinction.
And some of the other PlanS conditions have equally serious implications. The Hybrido journals are not just a target because of widespread fears that they are (often unintentionally) “double dipping” – charging APCs and taking subscriptions which accidentally cover the same content during embargo periods. By removing embargo periods and demanding immediate release of content under CC BY licence, PlanS removes the “need to subscribe “requirement, while by threatening to cap APCs by reducing what it will pay as part of research grants, funders could end up in control of publishing margins for a wide sector of the industry. Capping APCs will be tough, both in terms of co-ordination and in terms of content – the increasing need to include data, graphics and video in research content widens the range of charges and makes uniformity across disciplines difficult. Some authors will lose prestige, but few will reject funding because of it.
There will be winners too. Born-OA players like Hindawi and Frontier, and, since all of this is said to extend to books in time, new players in monograph publishing like Knowledge Unlatched. Apart from buying Gold OA journals quickly (availability strictly limited), what are STM publishers going to do? It is one thing saying that it will be slower to take effect than people think , or other parts of the world are different – it is all true – and it is another to say that there will be more mega journals, or that the industry will condense as societies cash in their journal annuity revenues – or there is only space for two big players (a long held belief of my own roundly rejected by most!), but it is harder to turn this into concrete action unless you place it in the context of the current trajectory of change.
The STM publishing business has known for a decade that the journal door is slowly closing. Those publishers at Frankfurt Book Fair next week who are not gripping the bar of the Hessicher Hof with whitening knuckles and asking for less water in their Scotch will be hurrying around to the UNSILO stand (Hall 4.2 L 86) to see if modelling manuscript evaluation in AI really works. Ever since publishers realised that their defensive moat of peer review was breached in a network society by the ability of evaluation to be a continuing process from funding to whenever, important publishers have been investing in scholarly workflow, led by Elsevier and Clarivate and Digital Sciences, in oversight of continuous review, in research support services, in improving discovery, in creating discipline mapping and bibliographical tools (Wizdom.ai), or in creating the dissemination and impact planning (Grow Kudos) that funders want to bake in to research approval and planning. The industry is shifting, and PlanS, by speeding change, may be doing everyone a favour.
Jul
23
The End Of The Beginning Of The End?
Filed Under Artificial intelligence, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, machine learning, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Is this Elsevier’s “music industry” moment? As more news emerges of German academics denied continuing access to journals, while Projekt Deal talks in Germany appear becalmed, there will certainly be anti-commercial publishing opinion in academe that hopes so. The whole debate on German access to Elsevier looks more and more like Britain’s Brexit talks, with one party in each case stating its minimum terms and not seeing any reason to settle for less, while the other reiterates “final positions” without getting any closer to a deal. And Elsevier will be as keenly aware as the poor UK trade negotiators that a false move in the push for a deal with someone who does not need to compromise simply hardens resistance to compromise. Those of us who have relied on the “surely good sense will prevail amongst people of good will on both sides” argument begin to despair of both sets of negotiations.
So what happens in a digitally networked world when parties fail to agree? Those with most skin in the game get hurt first. When the music industry faced the problems of download and disc burning it wasn’t strict enforcement of copyright that saved them from users who knew what they wanted and had the technology that could do it. Instead, music owners and distributors were faced to accept co-operation withe the technology plays as the price for continued participation in a, for them, smaller but still profitable market. And with that came consolidation, a different sort of investment profile and and a new relationship with the only really powerful people in a networked world – the end users.
And in Elsevier’s world those users have never been more powerful. As Joe Esposito rightly suggests in Holly Else’s Nature article (19 July), there is Sci-Hub for a start. But then there is more than that. Social networking has already been widely used to distribute articles. Many academics are acutely aware of who they most want their readers to be and regularly circulate to them. “Good enough” publishing on pre=print servers proliferates Institutional and individual reputation management raises its game. It is not that the whole and holy progress of traditional academic publishing comes to a halt – simply that water finds its way round a dam – and then gets used to and deepens the new water courses. Do we really needs articles? Can we just report the data? Can that and our discussions about it be cited? High level science research already carries huge cost and time pressures around research publication. Elsevier must be anxious in Germany about creating a breakpoint that drives publication in-house.
At this point I always find it useful to ask a silly question. And a favourite is “What would Steve Jobs have done with this problem?” Irrational responses do sometimes win markets. And Jobs after all responded to the levelling off of consumer computer markets by inventing the computer as a hub, to run iPhone, iPad, iPod etc. So, Steve, what do you think?
STEVE JOBS: “Well, I would scrap this Projekt Deal for a start. Its going nowhere. Just walk away. Tell them you are not interested anymore…
Then I would go to the Federal government and say ‘Can you get the research institutes, the universities and everyone concerned with research funding round a table? We have a plan to increase German research funding by 5-7% per year for five years without it costing the German taxpayer a cent.’
Then I would say to my people at Elsevier: we are the technically best equipped company in the sector. For 25 years we have invested in Science Direct, Scirus, Scopus, SciVal and the rest. We know the future is not in journals or even in content but we find it hard to divorce from the past and embrace the future. So we need a learning experience, to teach us how our next market works. But it comes at a price.
Then I would say to the German government: We want the contract for intelligent services and risk management in German research. We will put all our technologies into this deal. Its scope will be providing your research communities with ways of mapping prior and current work, in Germany and elsewhere, evaluating success or failure in current work , providing intelligent tools to give every researcher full-beam headlights in their niche, showing German research where its major collaborative possibilities and competitive pressures where, giving government and institutions unique insight into where quality of outcomes lies – and where current funding is being wasted. We offer you a five yer deal to populate all your systems with our knowledge, and since we are learning, building alongside you, and developing some new things on which you can earn royalties in future, we also offer you a special price. Now can we start negotiating?
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. We also have a special workflow deal – help us make the smoothest, hassle free workload system of uploading QA articles and you will never pay more than $1000 per article in APCs. And, as I always said at the end of presentations, One More Thing… all access to ALL journals to all users is completely free to all Elsevier registered German users for the life of this contract.”
There are of course no instant solutions and no predictability. But RELX investors, industry analysts and anyone trying to get an IPO off the ground will be hoping that someone somewhere will be able to find a breakpoint – here as well as with Brexit.
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