Y.S. described the distress and disorientation from conflicting pressures and uncertainty about one's self and one's role in society that seems to be the identity crisis experienced by many publishers today. It's an experience that he likened to adolescence, and it's fair to say that we're in the adolescence of a new form for the publishing industry. When this change is fast, Y.S. notes, new players can emerge on top - such as the Web's dominant portals and search engines that have taken advantage of new market opportunities. When change is slow, though, Y.S. notes that incumbents tend to prevail. Elsevier does its best to navigate its market opportunities into the channels that are in their adolescence and into established channels that are trying to develop new ways to add publishing value in established publishing forms. Looking at the long history of some publications like The Lancet, Y.S. sees publishing as "An endless innovation that connects authors with readers." It's all a community of interest, and one in which it's harder than ever to define a successful role in publishing. From that perspective, Y.S. sees a true publisher as one who is willing to sustain their publishing capabilities. "As all of the leading bloggers can attest, publishing is hard work," Y.S. notes, and no less hard for other venues. Science magazine notes that there is only a 50/50 chance that a new educational Web site will last more than five years: that's about on par for any small business. Risk taking does not always pay off.

"It is critical to understand the sociology of our users," Y.S. says, which must be done now in a technology environment in which Web technology is changing many fundamental aspects of how people consume and relate to both content and to one another. He sees this requiring being "uber-innovative" to become "uber publishers," resources that allow people to overcome the lack of time, attention and energy it takes to absorb a world of content at their fingertip. The average online users has 55 seconds to "get" a given site online, so publishing becomes like goods vendors trying to get shelving slots in a supermarket of limited capacity.

The solution from Y.S.'s perspective is to focus on three main attributes: quality, productivity and community. Quality means different things to different people, though: Encyclopedia Britannica, on percentage of content, is only 25 percent more accurate than Wikipedia. At number 17 on the list of popular Web sites the quality of community-managed content quality begins to speak for itself. But in scientific publishing, the picture is more complex. Peer reviewed research provides a long-standing community filter for content, but new models are needed as well. Getting quality content is only taking longer, Y.S. notes, so finding quality content in a usable context is only getting harder - which he notes that Elsevier is addressing via productivity gains through its products. Its Scopus and Scirius search platforms provide portals through which people can make best use of their 55 seconds and get a "this worked for me" feeling when they use their products. Building communities is hard as well, with few having that "gotta go" quality that attracts genuine participation. It's a concept that works well for teenagers on Web portals, but professional motivations are harder to satisfy for many.

Putting it all together, Y.S. sees it as providing the "great stuff, right away, gotta go" combination that quality, productivity and community provides in a successful publishing venture. The good news is that it's not all in the hands of Web 2.0 fanatics: major publishers such as Elsevier can forge new paths if they can be nimble with new products and new business models. The business model aspects are most problematic. Y.S. noted in the Q&A that Elsevier has been slow to respond to pricing issues, as they are still dependent on enterprise and institutional subscriptions.

Elsevier is working on experimental models with key clients, which Y.S. believes could prove to be revolutionary, so more to come. He sees multiple models emerging and allow users to choose what works best for them, which he believes will net similar revenues for existing products in addition to more revenues from new products. With new models such as Open Access nibbling at the edges of major publishers' model, there are external challenges of a sort, but with Elsevier's size he believes that there are opportunities to carve out a portion of publications as experiments, with the successful ones serving as models that can be rolled out to others. Expect more experiments - and perhaps a little confusion along the way - but also expect that Elsevier will be aggressive in managing the results.