With more publishers of scholarly and learned professional journal articles trying to build revenues through improved marketing, the search, display and sales tools being developed by DeepDyve are finding stronger interest than ever 2010 among publishers. DeepDyve exposes free and premium scholarly content through its own search engine and through the search tools of partners and makes it available through its read-only viewing tool embedded in Web pages. This allows people finding articles to "rent" them on a once-off basis in read-only mode for as little as 99 cents. This can be particularly handy for people who would otherwise have little occasion to purchase a full subscription to a premium scholarly journal, thus opening up this premium content to markets that would otherwise not provide opportunities for new publishing revenues.

Labels: business models, citeulike, deepdyve, degruyter, pay-per-view, rental, scholarly publishing, search

When Google Scholar launched five years ago on the Web, its aggregation of freely available scientific literature and citations launched some sizable seismic activity in publishing circles. All of a sudden, content that had been aggregated only via expensive subscription database services was available for free and accessible as easily as any Web page. Five years later, Google Scholar has expanded to include most freely available academic research sources, as well as abstracts from subscription sources and public patent records and is an increasingly popular resource for researchers and students. However, major aggregators of scientific publications still remain successful, in large part because they continue to develop more sophisticated search and display applications and, well, because time has been on their side. Pressures from Open Access advocates who press for free access to scientific research and an increasing array of applications built using Google Scholar as a source have begun to open major cracks in the barriers to entry into scientific publishing markets, but the people in charge of enterprise purse strings did not use Google Scholar in their university days. So, in spite of budget cuts. the status quo remains largely intact for many scholarly publishers.

Labels: case law, citations, Google, legal, LexisNexis, public records, Publishing, scholarly publishing, subscription, thomson reuters, thomson west, westlaw

I had the pleasure to hear two presentations recently by executives from the American Institute of Physics, the first by AIP Executive Director and CEO Fred Dylla at the recent ALPSP International Conference in Oxford, UK. Fred's presentation was an eloquent evaluation of the past, present and future of the scholarly publishing industry, in which he noted that indexing of scholarly content could be traced back to at least the 11th century. As much as we see scholarly publishing in many ways through the lens of print-oriented technologies, in fact scholarly debates preceded the widespread use of print publishing, and will outlast print as those debates move into new media. I really appreciated Dylla's far-sighted view of the industry, as well as the very immediate and concrete steps that AIP is undertaking to transform its place in that industry.

Labels: aip, alpsp, ASIDIC, collexis, dylla, gunter, ingoldsby, physics, scholarly publishing, Social Media, uniphy

Wired Science has the most in-your-face coverage of the formation of PRISM, an advocacy group formed by scholarly publishers to stem the legislative movement towards free access to government-funded scholarly research. This in and of itself is not a surprise, but Wired claims that the site is an example of astroturf advocacy, meaning an organization that tries to position itself as a grass-roots movement when in fact it is created by others wanting to appear to have grass roots support. PRISM is the creation of the Association of American Publishers, so one assumes that the roots of this organization are more likely to grow in the yards of scholarly publishers than the scientists providing the research. But is Wired's angry attitude towards PRISM justified?

The primary problem with PRISM is that it seems to be advocating on a range of issues which, while valid in their own right, are more about fear, uncertainty and doubt - those familiar sales tools - than the real issues at hand. Let's take a brief look at sme of the points that PRISM feels will result from unpaid access to government-sponsored research:

Undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it

This seems to be somewhat disingenuous, in that there may be alternative methods for supporting effective peer review that have not been explored by scientific publishers. Certainly a government-mandated publishing of research for free that doesn't take into account how that research is produced has the potential to be an unfunded mandate that could place an undue burden on scientific publishers. This is a real issue, but the answers to the issue may not lie with the government itself - they may lie with addressing how the peer review process is funded in general.

Opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;

There are certainly recent instances in which government research has been interfered with by political appointees in government agencies, but the bulk of this has been aimed towards communications with the public and legislators, not towards scientific papers. PRISM raises a valid concern but by conflating it with proposed government mandates to require public access to peer-reviewed publicly funded research they are playing more on sentiment than on actual evidence. Surely politics should stay out of science, but there's no indication at this time that the government would have the ability to influence the peer review process politically through these proposed mandates any more than it does today.

Subjecting the scientific record to the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling with definitive versions

There may be legitimate concerns raised in this point based on experience with the U.S. government's implementation of its current voluntary public access program, but PRISM seems to have conflated a number of issues under one banner. They would do better to call out the specific issues for people to understand their concerns and to reduce the emotional component of this appeal.

Introducing duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.

While this is a legitimate concern also, in fairness inefficiency is nothing new to the process of producing scholarly research, as are difficulties in dealing with publicly funded research programs. What this is really saying is "It's going to cost us publishers and we're not being given a penny for it."

If the purpose of PRISM is to convince legislators that there is an advocacy group that supports the publishers' goals then my sense is that they are going to fail. The site is not very convincing and lacks information about its supporters or any input from them that would influence people into thinking that there is a broad base of support for PRISM's views. PRISM does raise some important issues that need to be addressed in the rush to make access to government-funded research public, especially in how to support the peer review process realistically in an era in which public access to research is becoming a given. But the broader outlines of the solutions to many of these problems would seem to lie in how the scholarly publishing community has resisted changes in publishing technologies that disrupt their traditional business models.

With some added focus and some sponsorship of honest debate between government research sponsors, scientists and publishers PRISM may yet serve a positive and constructive purpose as an advocacy group. But if PRISM remains little more than an "astroturf" organization that defends the commercial interests of publishers then it's not likely to gain the needed respect from any of the parties that it needs to influence in this debate. Publishers in general are reluctant to engage their markets in a more conversational manner, but if scholarly publishers can position PRISM as a tool to build an honest conversation about the future of commercial and non-commercial scholarly publishing then they may be able to make some headway. At the moment I wouldn't bet on that happening, but you never know.

Labels: open access, PRISM, scholarly publishing

Google has been playing at the edges of the healthcare industry from a number of angles, with scholarly content, Google Co-op-indexed reference content and a nascent Google Health initiative under the tutelage of Architect Adam Bosworth. The Google Blog announced a new advisory group of healthcare industry heavies that seems to indicate that whatever is on the drawing board at Google is likely to have very broad and deep impact. In addition to the COO of the American Medical Association the advisory group includes major players from research, hospitals, government, foundations and general media. Very notably absent from the group, though, are major publishers of medical research.

This would seem to indicate that a fair amount of Google's focus on healthcare is going to be from a consumer standpoint, but there's another way of looking at this as well. Google is assembling the parties who have the most invested in successful outcomes from the most efficient collection and distribution of medical information possible. In other words, Google is looking at healthcare from the broadest systemic perspective possible - and may as a result be focusing in on new ways to assemble, integrate and deliver medical information and collaboration on a global basis that scholarly publishers are nowhere near ready or able to enable. With enormous inefficiencies in both services delivery and information distribution the medical industry is in a position not unlike the financial industry prior to the introduction of efficient electronic trading information services. This would seem to parallel the highly profitable approaches that Google has taken to other information problems such as advertising that were too caught up in older publishing models for traditional media companies to make the strides that Google made with contextual advertising.

While initial offerings may tend towards modest consumer-oriented efforts on a scale of Revolution Health I sense from what I've been taking in lately that this initiative will challenge the medical content industry even more than the news industry has been challenged by Google's moves into indexing their content. Keep a close eye on both the consumer side of this equation as well as moves into making research, medical insurance and other data more accessible than ever before - with our without traditional medical publishers.

Labels: Google, healthcare, scholarly publishing, Trends

O'Reilly Radar covers the recent shift of Nature magazine's publishing policies to enable access to scientific research and data prior to it being approved for final publication by the prestigious scientific journal. Pre-published content will appear on the ad-supported portal Nature Precedings, along with unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by Nature's professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. The Precedings portal enables registrants to comment on posted materials and to upload their own materials for screening. While there is no promised path to any posted materials becoming an approved juried publication the implication is that exposure may help that process - as on the competitive PLoS ONE portal.

In truth PLoS ONE is a much more sophisticated offering overall, providing much easier digestion, notation and discussion of posted documents. Where Nature Precedings presents core content mostly in Word and PDF documents, PLoS ONE converts content into native HTML for easier online consumption and with dynamic footnote references, as well as the ability to order content in printed format. PLoS One also provides "chunked" content such as graphs and tables to help people zoom in on results more effectively. But still, in fairness to Nature the Precedings is an enormous step forward for a traditional scholarly publisher, one which, when combined with Nature's exciting main portal, is bound to make it a far more attractive online community.

The advent of the Precedings portal underscores the dwindling importance of final publication for scientific content in particular but also the increasing recognition amongst all publishers that traditional concepts of media need to adjust more rapidly to online publishing. Prior to a publication being finalized it becomes a magnet for social media, gaining audience and unique interactions that are difficult to find elsewhere - perfect for building portal traffic. Once it is declared "a publication," the reverse is true - it becomes far more important for the finalized content to travel into as many other contexts as possible to find new value. Once content is fixed in its attributes it becomes media, a commodity stripped of community and immediately in need of finding new communities and individuals to appreciate it.

This points out both the strength and the weakness of social media: it can build up loyal audiences, but unlike traditional media social media is not easily syndicated - you can't "clone" a community, whereas traditional media is all about effective cloning through syndication and mass distribution. In this sense one can see from this model where the transition from social media to traditional media is more than just waving an "approved" wand: one's whole business model for a publication has the potential of changing rapidly once it passes through that status change.

While it's still very early days for the Nature Precedings portal already it's attracted a good amount of content across a wide range of categories, holding out the promise that it will become a destination of choice for scientific researchers. But as promising and aggressive as this move is the Nature team still has catch-up work to do to get this portal up to PLoS ONE standards of usability and reusability. One hopes that in time the portal can become a more active gateway to peer review and not turn into a dumping ground for various papers and ideas. The promise is there for such development; here's hoping that such developments come sooner rather than later.

UPDATE - To clarify, the Nature Precedings portal allows content to be published by its members without the fees associated with PLoS ONE and in general content on PLoS ONE is meant to be at least on a potential track for juried approval as a publication. But still, PLoS ONE winds up having more features that make it a highly usable destination for collaboration, whilst Nature Precedings is more like a download center with some comments on the side. It would seem that the Precedings offering would benefit from some of the PLoS ONE usability and community features. Bear in mind also that some precedings posts are near-finished papers as well; the difference in business models should not detract from the wide range of content that's coming on so far. In truth it's so early in the life of Precedings it's probably too early to judge it too much one way or another what it's likely to hold based on limited postings to date.

Labels: Nature, scholarly publishing, Trends

MIT Libraries reports on their cancellation of access to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ web-based database of technical papers, based on the SAE's insistence on using digital rights management controls on their content. MIT will instead be provided with an electronic index of documents that may be used to access print, CD-ROM or microfiche copies of papers. Professor Wai Cheng, SAE fellow and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, was amongst the figures pushing for the cancellation, intending to bring up the topic to the SAE's Publication Board.

This does not bode well for scholarly publishers who may be planning to use DRM controls as a way of managing electronic access. As generally implemented DRM controls make it difficult, if not impossible, to use premium content for collaboration, a key factor for research and engineering. Being able to manage content reuse is a key factor for scholarly publishers but it's doubtful that DRM will be able to satisfy many of their core audiences. Instead to insisting on reinforcing a print model that is increasingly incompatible with the productivity requirements of scientific and academic audiences scholarly publishers need to focus on how best to facilitate knowledge transfer. DRM does nothing to help facilitate knowledge transfer whatsoever. Hopefully the SAE and other societies and associations can work with their memberships to come up with more productive models for licensing content.

Labels: DRM, Licensing, MIT, SAE, scholarly publishing, Trends

As scholarly publishers drag their feet in responding to Open Access challenges to their business model, the Washington Post notes an effort by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to introduce open Web peer review for patent applications using technologies similar to those used on popular social media Web sites. The online system now under development will allow the public to post comments on patent applications and to have those comments rated by their peers, much in the way that social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.ius and Newsvine allow users to chime in on posted comments. Detailed profiles required for comment posters is hoped to dissuade bogus comments from infiltrating the system, though the potential for this is nevertheless acknowledged by the USPTO.

With USPTO officials overwhelmed with an onslaught of new patent applications - 4,000 examiners processed 332,000 applications last year - online peer review methods are a key initiative to help the agency to judge the worthiness of patent applications more efficiently. First up will be tech companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, with an open call for other participants. While scholarly researchers are likely to continue to use peer-reviewed publications from publishers as the principal gateway to vetting their ideas amongst peers the USPTO initiative offers an exciting alternative to traditional peer review methods for serious sci-tech innovations.

No peer review model is perfect, but online content and ecommerce services have accumulated extensive experience in what types of peer review methods are valuable and reliable. The key to moving scholarly publishing forward into more profitable and efficient methods will revolve around innovative approaches to peer review similar in general concept to the USPTO initiative. The key problem with scholarly peer review today is that there are too few peers willing and able to review too much potentially publishable content within the constraints of the existing system. While this does provide a certain degree of quality control, the pressures to publish journals on fixed schedules are in some ways more likely to push questionable research into print using today's peer review methods as methods that don't rely on the production limitations of print services. They don't call it "publish or perish" for nothing, after all.

A more open approach to scholarly peer review similar in concept to the USPTO initiative may have the potential to loosen review bottlenecks while maintaining the quality of the peer review process. The price to pay for this innovation is that such a system would begin to expose who in a scholarly community was really respected by their peers and leading publishers. As in other arenas of publishing the "brand name" institutions associated with quality research may find both their research papers and their scholars not receiving what they may feel is deserved recognition from a system that allows reviewers to express their preferences more openly and honestly than via the more closed process of today's journal-managed peer review processes.

But at the end of the day more open approaches to peer review are going to be necessary to gain the confidence of both scholarly researchers and the markets that they serve. The current PLoS One is a hopeful step in this direction, but the USPTO initiative offers scale that may prove out to scholarly publishers the importance of enabling a more open approach to peer review as a competitive necessity. While not every scientific discovery is likely to be backed up by the USPTO review methodology alone, it may create enough competitive force in the marketplace to jar scholarly publishers loose from their moorings and to consider how the broader marketplace for innovations will seek to have discoveries confirmed as valid in the eyes of their peers. We'll see how this unfolds, but for now consider this a major shift in the peer review process of technologies that's likely to ripple long and hard into scholarly publishing.

Labels: Best Practices, intellectual property, patents, peer review, scholarly publishing, Social Media

If scholarly publishers are unsure as to whether social media can act as a cornerstone for research they should consider the plans of Reuters (Guardian) to introduce a private social media service for financial analysts later this year. While details are sketchy at this stage, it appears that Reuters will enable researchers and other financial professionals to post out analysis, data and other key information that can be picked up by Reuters subscribers on a premium basis. The 70,000-plus users already connected to the Reuters Messaging service are expected to provide the core audience for this service and will no doubt also provide the core of its contributors also. We'll see what the final product looks like but it's a shrewd move to leverage the power of Web publishing in a way that may yet unseat Bloomberg's messaging service as the core of financial dialogues in institutional trading circles.

It's this kind of advanced thinking about how audiences want to be connected to one another more than to publishers that's lacking from so much of the print-oriented publishing world. As the content industry becomes more real-time in its overall contours it should recognize that there is plenty of money to be made in enabling conversations amongst connected peers - enough to power the financial industry to record profits in 2006, by the way. Instead of looking at the bottom line of their clients more publishers need to look at their top lines and to consider how their services are contributing to overall revenues and profitability for their customers. If scholarly publishers were servicing Wall Street they'd be talking about the importance of ticker tape and carrier pigeons to investment banking. Publishers can do far better than that - and, yet again, Reuters has.

Labels: financial information, real-time, Reuters, scholarly publishing

Information World Review recaps the recently signed declaration of major scientific, technical and medical journal publishers regarding pending E.U. legislation pushing to move towards free and open access to scholarly research after a limited time of private publications. The "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" has been gaining signatories over the past few weeks from major publishing houses and academic institutions. The ten-point document is a carefully crafted list of statements that attempts to justify the value of current publishing models to the scholarly community and institutions consuming their research. The statements range from the relatively innocuous - "The mission of publishers is to maximise the dissemination of knowledge through economically self-sustaining business models" - to the provocative: "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review."

In sum the intent of the declaration is to counter the movement towards government-mandated open access to papers deposited in publicly accessible online repositories. There are some compromises in the points designed to whittle away some who may be looking for ways to find some room for compromise - "Raw research data should be made freely available to all researchers" - but in sum the declaration is a statement that says, in effect, that scholarly publishers and the peer review process that supports their publishing processes work just fine and should not be challenged significantly. This is not unexpected, but it is disappointing nevertheless.

Scholarly publishers have recognized rightly that their trade is at a major crossroads given the pending E.U. legislation. Pushing forward with government-mandated open access without clear methods to support peer review processes required to generate that research may indeed pose a hazard to the integrity of academic research. But in truth this will be the case regardless of whether the E.U. open access initiative is passed or not. Existing publishing models for scholarly research may be sustainable indefinitely, but the open access movement has created already an important beachhead in the marketplace that questions not just the profit motive but the exiting peer review process. In essence the publishers are saying, "Let's keep our current inefficiencies because this is the only way that we can guarantee monies to sustain peer reviewing of papers." Yet as the demand for print journals diminishes and as more interactive peer review processes unfold through the open access initiative the necessity of high-priced journals pricing to maintain existing peer review methods is likely to be challenged strongly in the open marketplace.

Scholarly publishers are so tied to their existing revenue models that they fail to see even greater opportunities for profits in the processes that lead up to final publication. Although access to finalized juried publications is important, it's more important overall to researchers wishing to stay on the edge of important scholarly work to be a part of the discussions and modifications that lead up to the finalization of a paper. The peer review process as it exists today exposes new ideas to too narrow an audience for critique and enhancement prior to final publication. Instead of using today's print-based inefficiencies as the basis for journal pricing publishers should consider developing access to pre-publication materials through community-based online publishing as the basis for premium pricing. This will ensure better input from topic-oriented communities and relieve both publishers and governmental agencies from the need to focus on protecting copyright of finalized materials as the basis for scholarly publishing profits.

In an era in which Wikis, weblogs and other social media are demonstrating the ability of community publishing to be monetized effectively content producers of all kinds need to adjust to the idea that controlling copies of content is not as important as managing the communities that generate it and consume it. Copyright still has an important place in publishing but increasingly it will revert to a secondary role as licensing access to private communities whose communications are at least as valuable as finished works of authorship gains center stage. In the marketplace of ideas, people will gravitate towards being in on the key conversations far more than they will the minutes of those conversations. By focusing too intently on the threat to existing monetization models scholarly publishers are likely to be bypassed as other well-funded efforts move past the copyright model and towards more dynamic ways to generate value from scholarly publishing. The Brussels Declaration will to little if anything to change these realities.

Labels: Brussels Declaration, copyright, open access, scholarly publishing, Social Media, STM