Subscribe for Free |   View PDF |  Send to a Friend |   Library Connect News  |   | 

search this site search web

Scholarly Publishing: 12 Observations on the Current Situation and Challenges for the Future
Karen Hunter, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Elsevier, New York, USA

The world of scholarly publishing has become a much more complicated place in the last decade. In the early 1990s we knew what we had to do - get our journals into electronic form and establish a distribution network. The task became easier as the Internet and Web browsers smoothed the process somewhat. But the challenges were still enormous and we had few questions about strategy or priorities for a number of years. Those were also the days when it was still reasonable to talk about long-term plans and five-year horizons. Today we often talk of “strategic plans” with only a two-to-three year view. The world is not as clear, and when we look at where we should be placing our strategic bets we find a less than obvious message in the crystal ball.

In this article I want to make a number of observations about the current situation and future challenges. I also want to credit ideas I’ve heard this year in presentations given by Deanna Marcum of CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources); Ann Okerson of Yale; Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information; and a number of speakers - academics, librarians and publishers - at an STM conference on universal access held in Amsterdam this May. I think many of these observations represent opportunities for discussion, negotiation and cooperation between librarians and publishers.

1) We are still very early in the e-transformation process.

Our collective focus has been principally on access rather than on content and fitting that content to the user community’s needs. The focus has been on new business models, licensing, permanent access/preservation archiving and access in nations with the lowest economic opportunities. Scholarly e-content has largely replicated the paper but many still see the paper as the definitive edition although, in fact, the electronic is becoming increasingly definitive.

2) As a community we have been spectacularly successful in broadening access.

Contrast the situation 10 years ago: annually decreasing paper circulation, often only a few hundred copies in libraries to which people had to go to get access, one person per issue at a time. Today, desktop access is available to literally all researchers - either under site license or on a pay-per-view basis. Elsevier has more than nine million active, repeat, online users. Elsevier also provides free access to over 600 titles in over 60 of the world’s poorest countries.

3) The current preoccupation with “free access” rests on false assumptions.

Education is not free to students and information in support of education is not free either - any more than food, computers or football stadiums. According to the National Academy of Sciences, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2003, the US Federal Government is currently funding only about a third of all basic research. Given Elsevier’s international base, fewer than 10% of the articles we publish are based on research funded by US federal taxpayers.

4) There is a need to rethink the organization of information to improve data and text mining.

Clifford Lynch has made the point that we are still writing for human readers, without adequately providing for machine readers. There is a long way to go here. Information that is structured still needs improvement and the role of unstructured text in retrieval (i.e., full-text searching) has to be explored much more. Recent discussions within CrossRef, for example, have looked at whether to provide full-text searching across the combined databases of the member publishers. And if so, how? By setting up a new search service or by using existing services such as Scirus or Google?

5) We will all soon face the need to deal with large data sets more often.

Who will hold these data sets and who will make sure they are preserved? Is this, as Clifford Lynch has argued, a role for institutional repositories? Surely, if the data is important to preserve (and I think it has never had a particularly high priority in the past), asking the author to do it - particularly under the misnomer “self-archiving” - is not the answer. But publishers are not necessarily well suited for the permanent preservation of large data sets either. Perhaps institutional repositories are key here.

6) More creative strategies are required for unlocking non-journal information, particularly from books.

The relatively low productivity of nonfiction online book publishing is astonishing. So much of what is currently available for books is more in the form of book dumps than well-structured, linked information. This is beginning to change for reference works, but there are still enormous efforts to be made to liberate the information currently locked in books.

7) How do we enable the manipulation and use of all types of information?

Let me simply quote Clifford Lynch here: “We really have very little experience in developing economic and legal and business agreements that allow computation, extraction, derivation, reuse, correlation, reintegration into other databases.” It is essential that we both technically enable this in the future and legally make it possible.

8) Understanding where there is a need for digitized information and who needs it.

At the STM conference I mentioned above, one researcher noted that 95% of the information he needs hasn’t been digitized yet. Deanna Marcum, formally of CLIR and now at the Library of Congress, is calling for massive, cooperative digitization efforts. But we need to understand what should have priority. My expectation is that this will be very discipline-specific, as will the development of tools for retrieval and manipulation of the converted data. This is an area where I think that a publisher such as Elsevier, with the expertise in large-scale digitization projects and the deep pockets to undertake such large-scale projects, might be able to develop new initiatives. But first we need to understand better what is needed.

9) We need to seek sustainable economic models based on value.

Economists argue that those who value something must be the ones who support it economically. Take the example of metadata. I heard recently that TV Guide makes more money than the three major TV stations combined. We are being urged to give metadata away, discouraging investment in better metadata. What do you give away and what do you keep for enrichment and development? There also needs to be a continued search for models that have economic sustainability.

10) The balance between cooperation and competition is not easy.

Libraries have had this problem for a long time. Do you cooperate in collection acquisition - or now, digitization efforts - and all wind up having the same thing? And, if so, is that bad? Will the competition be, as Deanna Marcum has suggested, in “the ingeniousness with which individual libraries tailor resource access to the particular needs of their user communities.” Ann Okerson has used the analogy of the airline loyalty programs, such as “Star Alliance,” to describe a new type of cooperation.

Publishers have the same problem. To what extent do they cooperate and to what extent compete? Publishers have thrived on marketplace competition among researchers, research institutions and their libraries, and among states and nations. Competition among publishers has never been greater than at present. While biased, I think the concern about consolidation is misplaced. Does anyone think that either Ford or General Motors is having a monopolistic, easy time?

11) “Disruptive technologies” and the importance of continued innovation.

I am intrigued by this concept. According to an article written earlier this year (and found via Google), “disruptive technologies” are technologies that “not only create new industries, but eventually change the world.” Wireless communication, 100 years after its invention, is still disruptive - indeed, more than it was at its invention. Web browsers can also be cited. A speaker at the STM meeting said about large companies: “In a large company, the whole infrastructure and culture acts like gravity, pulling you back to where you started from. You can never reach escape velocity.” Could this be true of large institutions generally? Libraries and universities, for example? This has to be resisted. It is essential that we all continue to innovate.

12) Investing is much more difficult for publishers today than even a decade ago.

Coming full circle to one of my early points, it is hard to look much beyond two-to-three years. Of course we do take on projects and new business initiatives that have longer investment requirements and where any return is years away. We have always done that - new journals typically took five-to-seven years to make a profit.

The risk of such investments now, however, is greater because the investments are larger and the world is changing much more quickly. We are betting in a very different environment, which is hard for a conservative publishing industry to adapt to, and takes a culture change. I recall discussions in 1978 and 1979 when a consultant we were using described what essentially is now the Internet. We did take some early actions then to begin to adapt. In actuality though, the really big investments didn’t kick-in until over a decade later - after going through such exciting distractions as CD-ROM. Perhaps the biggest challenge for us now is to decide when to invest, on what and for whom.

This article is based on a presentation given by Karen Hunter at the NELINET Institute on Principles, Pricing and Money in June 2003.

¹Jackson, J. (2003). Disruptive Technologies. Washington Technologies,17 (20).