Aug
9
If Peer Review were a Drug-it wouldn’t get onto the Market
Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Somewhere in the UK’s Palace of Westminster, where members of Parliament and their lordships, the Peers of the Upper House, will be recalled to discuss Britain’s urban conflagration, a tiny group of MPs have until recently been locked in solemn conclave in a Committee Room to finalize a report on… (no, not the economic disasters, or the future of communication with the Murdochs, but…) …the future of peer review in scholarly research publishing in science. To the profound relief of traditional science journal publishers everywhere, the report concludes that nothing much needs to be done by anyone to anything at any great rate, especially if change requires investment (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmsctech/856/85602.htm). Yet some far-seeing and radical publishers are beginning to change traditional rules – so why do they see the need for action while others crave only for the status quo?
It may well be the case that the largest long term impact of Open Access on scientific research reporting is not on business models or usage rights but, as this report goes to great lengths to deny, on peer review. We now have a situation where growing volumes of articles, waiting at the gate for time consuming single or double blind reviewing by unpaid armies of academics, are increasingly able to move past the “does it have an impact on the study of this subject?” test and pass only the essential but simpler technical surveillance implied in a test which asks “is this good scientific method and is it reproducible?”. This is the revolution wrought by Plos One and which is now being followed widely (Nature Communications and elsewhere). The Select Committee enquiry, while paying lip service to this, never brought itself to the point of quite grasping what has happened, and the evidence of publishers allowed them to happily luxuriate in that innocence.
The title of this piece is a quote from an American commentator given in evidence. It is one of the few peripheral signs of a widespread fear that the game is up for peer review where that means journals that clique-ishly track one school of thought and exclude others, where originality and innovation may fail at the barrier of even double blind reviewing (in niche sub-disciplines of some life sciences, everyone knows everyone’s research areas, or can look them up, anyway). No more than passing reference was made to gender prejudice, or indeed the craving of some journals to deter BRIC-based research – and others to artificially encourage it.
Having taken its evidence from those on both sides anxious for the status quo to be preserved, it is not surprising that the Parliamentary Committee drew a blank. While it noted that the BMJ followed an Open Peer Review methodology, it did not appear to feel it necessary to recommend this to others. Yet an increasing body of opinion seems to be saying that while a simple set of technical tests may be all that is needed to get into the database, all of these processes must be completely open. Peers should be brave enough to stand behind their views, review notes and correspondence should be published, evidential data supporting the experiments should be available, and, post-publication, notes and correspondence relating to reproducibility of the experiment should appear alongside the article. At the same time bibliometrics relating to citation and to actual usage must also be maintained. It seems to some observers that Publishers might have to dismantle the cozy editorial relationships that surround current practice in favour of appointing some paid-for fulltime investigators to give a thorough and documented public technical report on whether the paper applies recognizable scientific method which aligns with accepted good practice, and then track and publish reactions to the work within the community. In other words, a different way of spending the £1.9 bn said in RIN’s 2008 report to be the cost of peer review.
And then you see publishers with a real sense of community ownership beginning to build the tools that will allow them to do this. This week the American Institute of Physics (www.aip.org) launched its iPeerReview tool, allowing authors and reviewers to download an app to their iPhone/iPad enabling them to review status and do work on articles submitted and in work in progress. This extends AIP’s existing workflow environments, Scitation and Peer X-Press. The day is not long off when this type of workflow tool will not only be omnipresent but also transparent, and while some competitive issues, especially around patents applied for, will need careful handling, so much of this research is pre-competitive that this may be less of a problem than first appears. Publishing evidential data may be more of an issue . Publishers and academic administrators currently chorus that the cost would be excessive, but surely they cannot be talking, as they did to the Parliamentary Committee, about the costs of storage, since those are a fraction of what they were a decade ago, and anyway the evidence is already stored by the research project – it just needs to be linked and accessible, and transparently available for other researchers, with permission, to use their own tools to search it and other experimental data with the range of mining and extraction tools now open to them. Publishers should perhaps be in the forefront of extending this service base to their communities of users: those giving evidence to the committee seemed more anxious to defend the journal, as if it were a craft skill like dry stone walling, hedge laying or wattle hurdle making.
And then I came across GSE Research.com, a new project in beta which will launch in the fall. It aims to provide an effective Open Access platform for research into Governance, Environmental Science and Sustainability, importantly relating research to practice and allowing users a full community participation alongside researchers and professionals. But it was not the built-digital features (how much easier without a print legacy!), or the social investment fund or even the Research Exchange that first attracted me. It was the emphasis on putting in, alongside the option for a traditional review model, a fast publication Open Peer Review system, in which the Editor makes the first decision, and the community is able to comment, build and improve the result. “We need to learn to include, not exclude, and give the peer community a chance to decide what is relevant, (not just a handful of individuals.” This is a project to watch, but also a trend to be noted. (www.gseresearch.com )
So should we be surprised or disappointed with the result of the Commons deliberations? As a UK taxpayer, I feel like asking for my money back, but as an observer of Parliamentary Committees, noting the number of times the Murdochs and their executives appeared before them before the Great Hacking Scandal broke, surprise would hardly be in the range of available emotional responses.
Aug
3
Learning a lesson from Jana and Teachers?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Cengage, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Activist investors from hedge fund Jana and the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund (“Teachers”) have bought 5.2% of McGraw-Hill Corporation with the avowed intent of forcing the division of the company into a financial services company and an educational/B2B company.
When the activists arrive, they always show an immediate profit: this announcement triggered a sharp rise in McGraw’s share price (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/mcgraw-hill-shares-rise-after-activist-stake/), and a great deal more interest in what many media market investors have long regarded as an unspectacular mid-market performer. Disincentives in large media players have always included unified Chairman/CEO roles, and divided equity classes with limitations on voting shares. Incentives have always included the thought of break-up in conditions where the sum of the parts may be found to be greater than the value of the whole. McGraw now faces this scenario, and has known for at least a year that it was likely. Hence the strategic portfolio review launched last Fall, and the creation of a McGraw-Hill Financial Services division. But now that the real question has been asked by Teachers and Jana, how can management react without appearing to be running the company on the agenda of a powerful but still small shareholder?
Over the last decade the great principle in developing B2B assets has always been Portfolio. Sir Crispin Davies practised this at Reed, building a four legged table in the sure and certain knowledge that not all markets would go bad at once. Problems only arose when the education leg fell off, and the last recession provided his successors with the assurance that all markets can go wrong at once. Thomson Reuters’ reaction was different; move away from Portfolio into Wide Vertical – a huge construction from law and regulation to financial services and transactions where a broad base of clients can be inter-related and cross sold, and where service and content assets can be optimized. Will it work? Well, its work in progress and good progress is being made. And the not wanted on board assets like Healthcare are on the block.
These are options. But what about the McGraw-Hill asset base? What are its strengths and where does it dominate? The first thing to say is that, in comparative terms, great changes have taken place in the past few years which have surprised observers of this often fiercely conservative company. The sale of BusinessWeek and the acquisition of J D Power are cases in point. But in terms of the wholesale creation of the group asset base in digital first terms? Progress is there, but is seen by outsiders as slow and patchy, part of niche and product strategies rather than the platform and standards driven thinking of some of the market leaders. There is no doubting the pre-eminence of Standard and Poor’s, however, and the activists, by attacking at this point, may be more likely to set up a bidding war for this (Hearst are already in Fitch, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters lead these markets) than create a successful IPO.
What about the other assets? B2B has huge positions of strength, but they are all under pressure. McGraw have long dominated construction, but now finds that while it did all the right things to get Sweets and FW Dodds into workflow networks, recession (and an ill-judged law suit with Reed Construction) has lost it concentration and time to market. Alongside it, Platts rested on its laurels for too long as the leader in oil price indexation (losing market position with Aramco to the tiny British player Argus Media) and is now rushing to catch up in other asset classes (its latest buy was the Steel Index) and broadening a portfolio which should be doing very well at this time. One hopes that Platts is seen as much as anything as a part of financial services (who bought New Energy Finance and Point Carbon? Bloomberg and Reuters), but probably it is seen as the counterbalance to construction and the aerospace/aviation holdings (who lost out to Reed in bidding for Ascend Worldwide), both of whom continue to require careful nursing to bring their brand strengths into full recognition in the digitally networked marketplaces in which they exist.
But you cannot invest in everything at once. McGraw-Hill Education is a case in point. This side of the company created digital firsts 15 years ago (think of Primis) but then was allowed to graze as a cash cow when other priorities in the portfolio became more important. With Pearson now emerging as the unassailably dominant player in North American education, but the whole market suffering a hangover now that school spending cuts from 2009 are hitting spending with full force, McGraw-Hill has nowhere to go. Its overseas holdings are tiny, and mostly in Higher Education: Pearson is now getting considerable and sustaining returns from non-US markets which have taken a decade to create. Meanwhile McGraw seem at last, after constant strategic re-appraisal and constant changes of CEO (to the point where they are now run by the former veteran group CFO) to be heading in a digital first direction, launching really interesting environments like Campus and ensuring that all of their content is digital and licenced from the very beginning. Is this too late? We can only tell when markets recover, but outsiders might well think that US education was over-published. How things will consolidate (the assets are Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, McGraw and Kaplan) may be one of the outcomes of the Jana move.
McGraw’s latest announcements indicate 11% growth in income in the second quarter but a 5% drop in education revenues. Neither of these is in the least surprising, and may indicate some signs of recovery. But now the question has been asked, every piece of emerging evidence will be used to support a break-up theory. And now two points of caution for those prone to jump to conclusions: Teachers is not the same as the Ontario Municipal workers pension fund which co-owns Cengage with Apax, and the David McGraw who is CFO of Teachers is …no relation. Now that the News of the World is closed and hacking has ceased you will just have to take my word for it!
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