The announcement for Wolters Kluwer's new PubFusion content management tool claims that its EMC-based infrastructure is the first electronic package of its kind offered to scholarly journal publishers, an effort to recycle internal infrastructure that WK uses for its own journal and product production processes for its 160 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins journals. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins will be the marketing unit for the software which will be demonstrated at London Online. There are no online marketing materials for the product yet, but based on the existing LW&W titles and the PR information it's clearly a production system that tilts towards print production with "hooks" for presenting print-oriented materials online via a publisher's portal and via partners' channels. That's not a bad thing, given the state of scholarly journal marketing today. It allows them to hold down production costs with less paper-intensive processes as well as to use a production platform what will grow in more electronic-oriented directions without having to invest in bespoke/custom programming.

Think of PubFusion as ECNext for the scholarly set, if you will, helping smaller publishers to take advantage of solid infrastructure that's at least in line with the market's expectations. The fact that a major aggregator is initiating this effort gives it that much extra marketing punch, providing publishers with a look at how The New Aggregation is going to look moving forward. Content companies can support their clients' publishing needs with whatever discrete publishing and aggregation services add value to the content production and marketing process, either separately or in select bundles of capabilities. No longer does the content have to come to the database: the database can come to the content and provide value to the publishing process that can help publishers control costs and drive new revenue channels. PubFusion could be many things more than it is today, but as a starting point it's hats off to a great use of content technology assets that can help Wolters Kluwer build stronger marketing relationships with scholarly publishers.