Dec
10
Political Potpourri
Filed Under Blog, data protection, Education, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
When I want to write about innovation a political agenda looms. When I write about what the politicians are doing to the information industry I find it is so deeply unsatisfying and depressing that I am forced back onto descriptions of industry self-survivalism! But at times there is no choice: politics is a burden we all have to bear, and we in the UK bear a particularly heavy burden at the moment. Unless you have been sheltering in an igloo in Lapland awaiting Father Christmas, you cannot have failed to hear something of Britain’s latest Euro Row, which hit gale force this week with the ferocity of the storms that hit Scotland and generated 165 mph winds and set wind turbines alight. The political equivalent of this was a British Prime Minister using his veto in a European Summit and ending up in a minority of four, which is likely to diminish to one.
Why is this in the least interest of the information industry? While Mr Cameron acted in order to prevent his coalition from breaking down and splits developing in his own party, his ostensible reason was to prevent the European Union passing laws disadvantageous to the city of London. Financial services are 10% of UK GDP. They must be protected as the key to success in Europe. Yet, as Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, notes in his editorial this morning, there is nothing to prevent the 26members of the Union who will now get together in tighter conclave on budget, tax and trading matters to pass laws which discriminate against City interests, as long as those laws do not infringe the current regulation of the greater community of which the UK is still a member. The Prime Minister is claiming victory: he should take care. Every British victory in Europe since 1815 has been followed by Britain losing the peace.
And have a care too in more domestic matters. The junior Business minister, David “Two Brains” Willetts, supported a leadership speech on the importance of the British role in Big Pharma by undertaking to secure, despite lively public protests, the release of anonymized datasets covering diagnostic and prescription practice in the NHS, still the world’s largest health service. Yet he appears to forget that it is impossible to do this unilaterally. Not only are the major pharma players global titans, but providing UK-based players like GSK with information denied to their German or French rivals would be a state aid, or at least a restraint of trade, condemning UK government to the dock in the courtrooms of that very alliance whose powers they have recently been diminishing. And do these data and their availability do anything to promote employment in research labs in the UK? Nothing at all: we are missing the point about a networked economy if we think otherwise.
Elsewhere in the deeply paranoid British civil service, we continued last week in the hugely entertaining game of finding the pea under the information walnut shells. Having declared a Public Data Corporation to trade government-created content with the private sector, public consultations have led to real divisions about what this superstructure is meant to achieve. Local government and SOCITM, the public sector IT professionals, clearly read the intent rather than the effect of the proposals; This is an effort to frustrate the privatization of the UK Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Met Office by regulatory obfuscation – and it is working splendidly well. Meanwhile, a near meaningless consultation on MiData – a government plan for re-regulating identity protection – has created a panel of private sector players, including Google and the real villains (energy utilities, high street banks) to give consumers more assurance that their identity information is not being grossly misused. The government’s seriousness on this topic is underlined by the size of their budget of £10m ($15m)!
Finally, the week ended with the revelation that school examination boards regularly brief teachers, in seminars paid for by schools, on what the upcoming examination is likely to cover. This is apparently scandalous, as if the huge National Curriculum requirement could ever be fully examined without giving hundreds of question options in the exam papers. What is the purpose of the examination if it is not to test what has been taught? As a result, several examiners have been suspended for cheating, several inquiries have been set in train, and the interesting idea flated that all the examination boards should be combined, and then privatized (since they would then be easier to regulate, fine, and would face regular contract renewal. Pearson already own one board. And ETS formerly held the SATS marking contract but lost it after an equally unilluminating controversy about performance. Change in outcomes then may not be a direct result of the causes of concern.
Apart from which little happened in information market politics last week. Back to innovation next week, with a sigh of relief.
Oct
13
I can see so clearly now…
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
In case anyone has doubts, this is a continuing stream of (un)consciousness arising from my earlier Dogpatch thoughts about innovation and STM. And, of course, in my enthusiasm for the new, I neglected some of the “slightly older but just as valid” new. Thanks everyone for reminding me of this. We shall go there anon, but I wanted to start at the STM Association dinner the night before the events described in my last blog. There I had the pleasure of sitting next to Rhonda Oliver, now running publishing at the Royal College of Nursing, but doing so after leaving Portland Press, where she was CEO. And it was Portland Press, a distinguished but not yet world dominant player in biochemistry publishing, that I first learnt of really interesting forays ito the world of semantic-based publishing. Here is what I wrote about them in this blog last year:
“Particularly noteworthy was a talk by Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer from the University of Manchester (how good to see a biochemistry informatician and a computer scientist sharing the same platform!). They spoke about Utopia Documents, a next generation document reader developed for the Biochemical Journal which identifies features in PDFs and semantically annotates them, seamlessly connecting documents to online data. All of a sudden we are emerging onto the semantic web stage with very practical and pragmatic demonstrations of the virtues of Linked Data. The message was very clear: go home and mark-up everything you have, for no one now knows what content will need to link to what in a web of increasing linkage universality and complexity. At the very least every one who considers themselves a publisher, and especially a science publisher, should read the review article by Attwood, Pettifer and their colleagues in Biochemical Journal (Calling International Rescue: Knowledge Lost in the Literature and information Landslide http://www.biochemj.org/bj/424/0317/bj4240317.htm). Incidentally, they cite Amos Bairoch and his reflections on Annotation in Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3092/version/1) and this is hugely useful if you can generalize from the problems of biocuration to the chaos that each of us faces in our own domains.”
And the reference to Steve Pettifer recalled to mind my old friend Jan Velterop, once agent-provocateur in Springer’s thrust into OA (how grateful they should be to him now, given that his work drew them alongside BMC, and thus to real growth in this year of OA and eBooks compensating for negative trends elsewhere). Dr Pettifer advises Utopia Documents (http://getutopia.com), who have been developing in parallel to Labiva and Mendeley in the workflow space for PDFs. Each is different, though they have common attributes. The fact that there are now three environments in this space is a strength for all of them. Isolated good ideas rarely work out. Constantly re-iterated solutions “invented” separately in several places shows a sector responding to the same calls from many customers – “Help me out of here – I am losing control!”.
Utopia Documents is also running a public trial on Elsevier’s SciVerse environment. This is critical, and prompts a question: if Nature and Elsevier see this, why doesn’t everyone else? And I think this may be in part because we have been confusing the workflow utility of PDF handling with the strange world of scientific networking. In one of the many frank and helpful comments made by Annette Thomas in the interview I referred to earlier this week, she remarked that much of what Nature had done to “create” networking between scientists had shown very modest results. She said that while scientists showed a modest appetite for networking via news and blog comments, she thought that Nature Networks did not succeed because they lacked the immediacy and involvement of workflow tools, and it was more likely that in this context real contact between self-formed interest groups would take place. Here she seems to be moving closer to the Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) position, but with a qualification. She clearly feels that you build the utilities first, and then see how interest groups develop their own dynamic using the shared information created by the toolset. Crowd-sourcing a la Mendeley is good, but self determination may be better.
Thinking about Portland Press and Jan Velterop also took me back to Jan’s company, Academic Concept Knowledge Ltd (AQnowledge – http://aqnowledge.tumblr.com). The semantic search environment created here is now embedded in Utopia Documents. But this is not what strikes me most emphatically about Jan’s work in recent years. Here is a hugely experienced academic research publisher who is not format bound and can think beyond the book, the journal, and even the article. Integrating antibodies-online.com, with its 300,000 antibodies and related products for concept matching shows that he and his team are creating a small player with an eye for data and for what research workflow really entails. By putting together all of the laboratory supply sources and the raft of descriptive material that they generate AQnowledge may be doing more for using article stores as a live element in workflow than any of their peers. Yet it has taken a company like BioRAFT (www.bioraft.com) to push this home with compliance information, demonstrating once again that we are in the sectoral tools age of workflow, unable as yet to envisage the full desktop of tools and utilities, or the way they link together, or indeed the Electronic Lab Manual to which they in all probability lead.
Finally, STM now has major players – think of MarkLogic, TEMIS and SilverChair to name but three – quite capable of deploying the technology to drive towards the Big Data vision which I referenced in my previous piece. So, with all of this in the wings, why do the publishers still want to pursue the parochial and eschew the visionary?
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