Nov

24

Springer’s Dance to the Music of Time

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, Publishing, STM | 2 Comments

Once again the hills around Heidelberg are alive to the sound of music.  This time, however, we know when the music stops.  As the Springer debt of around £2 billion matures in the next year, owners Cinven and Candover must decide whether to renegotiate with the banks – expensive – or sell and trigger the change of ownership clauses that allow the banks to renegotiate the debt – very expensive , but someone else’s problem.  After all, Cinven and Candover have already cleared their profits in the three re-financings they have already led and will not wish to stick around to see that margin diminished. The FT (24 November 2009) says that the private equity owners will now sell the whole of Springer for less than the €400 million which they had hoped to get for only 49% just a few months ago .

Those private equity players still in the bidding (the FT says they are EQT and Apax) must be very miffed by these proceedings.  And the Springer management team, which has done a splendid job in reviving the margins of a great but wasted asset since it took over in 2003, must also be scratching their heads, and wondering if this is the moment to leave the dance floor and head for the bank.  But if the price is really where the FT says it is, then the door would be open for many more players to join the game of musical chairs.  The private equity players are put off by the debt , the regulator would rule out Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell are still swallowing and saying never again, but a joint enterprise of Thomson Reuters Science and Healthcare with Springer, floated in New York , would make great sense.  It gives Springer more US exposure and adds a healthcare arm, and the potential of using ISI as an upward step into academic and research service markets.  Which is just where a major primary content publisher should be wanting to go.

Verdict: this is just too obvious ever to take place. When the music stops, you usually find you are on the wrong chair, and sometimes that you do not have a chair at all.

Nov

19

Baroque intricacies in British Library

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, Publishing, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I went to the launch party on Wednesday for a joint report by RIN (the Research Information Network) and the British Library called “Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences“. Sounds riveting , doesn’t it? And actually … it is. One of the speakers waxed lyrical about the “baroque intricacies of information exchange”, and I ended, after looking at  the report, by seeing what he meant .

We are still so young in workflow analysis that looking at the ways that researchers in life sciences, for example, pursue their business on the network contains surprises. Patterns are strongly differentiated by niche and subject, there is great individuality, patterns are really complex etc . But did we expect anything else?  Look in this report at the models for epidemiology of zoonotic diseases and for neuroscience in particular, and see the nodal role of analysis, the mapping elements, definitional processes, and the positioning of evidential data . There is never going to be a universal researcher workflow model, but the eight elegant flow diagrams created from this report by Ann Bruce of the research team should be on the desk of every STM publisher who wishes to move up the value chain from the article publishing world into a safer future. Not that articles are unimportant in these workflows – they just take up less time and value than publishers like to think .

Visiting the British Libray is good too. With the huge BioMedical Research Insitute growing up in its back yard, and its recent announcement of the launch of Datacite, a DOI style identifier system for evidential data, it appears to be keeping its focus on its vital  STM customers. Yet there was not a single commercial publisher (unless you count PLoS!) in the room at the launch of this report. Very sad indeed.  There may be valid reasons for publishers to want to change the Library’s view on a great number of topics, but it has to be reckoned with and will not go away.

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