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Elsevier launches new advertiser-supported portal for oncologists
By Monique Fayad, Senior Vice President, Publisher OncologySTAT, Elsevier, New York, NY, USA

Monique Fayad

If there are two things doctors need today to help manage workflow and deliver quality care, it’s reliable professional health content from a trusted source and delivery of this content via accessible channels and formats. If there is a third, it’s that this information is made available for free.

In September 2007, Elsevier launched OncologySTAT (www.oncologystat.com) to address these needs. While physicians and health care professionals have witnessed a proliferation of free medical content via the Internet, little of this free content comes from established peer-reviewed sources. OncologySTAT is the first portal specifically designed for cancer care professionals and offered by a leading scientific, technical and medical publisher. The general public, including cancer patients, survivors and caregivers, also can access all the information on the site upon completing a quick registration form.

OncologySTAT provides a variety of evidence-based professional cancer information resources and features, including news, blogs and webinars; access to professional drug and interaction databases; and the ability to search journals and MEDLINE.

What has attracted the most attention from the media and librarian communities, however, is that OncologySTAT additionally provides search-based access to fulltext oncology-related articles from more than 100 Elsevier journals.

Free access to journal content?

Not exactly. Elsevier is able to offer free content to registrants because OncologySTAT is sponsored by advertisers, initially pharmaceutical companies. This approach isn’t new, as pharma advertisers have subsidized print content for years. Plus, as in print, the advertising is unobtrusive with no influence upon editorial content. What is new, however, is that registered users can access peer-reviewed content entirely for free.

Many librarians may wonder if this means they should cancel subscriptions to oncology-related journals. In all likelihood, most subscribers to such journals will see that OncologySTAT addresses a very different need for online information access and decide to retain their current print or electronic journal subscriptions.

OncologySTAT isn’t meant to replicate a purchased online or print journal experience. Users can gain access to the same oncology-related content, but only on a 12-month rolling basis. Only subscribers to print or electronic journals will retain access to the full archives or backfiles of those journals, which is vital for research. Journal subscribers will also experience better article browsability, either by reviewing journal hard copies or accessing journal content via ScienceDirect. That’s because OncologySTAT journal articles are aggregated with all other OncologySTAT content that is searchable by relevance. On OncologySTAT, there’s no table-of-contents viewing or searching by journal source.

OncologySTAT journal and editorial content provides current oncology-related information for immediate use within the practitioner’s workflow. Users will find the site informative and may, at times, save money they would otherwise spend for pay-per-view journal access. Most researchers, however, need to browse research journals on a regular basis and engage in "serendipitous discovery" and therefore will want to continue to subscribe to trusted journals or access them through institutional subscriptions.

Implications of this new model

Most analysts and media commenting so far consider Elsevier’s launch of sponsored professional health portals a wise, if not inevitable, move given the emergence of competitive online content providers and the rapid increase in pharmaceutical online advertising. According to Outsell (2007), a publishing industry market research and consulting company, online advertising is growing three times faster than advertising spent on print and events. eMarketer (2007), an online market research firm, estimates the total size of pharmaceutical and health care online advertising (standing at US$975 million in 2007) will surpass $2 billion by 2011.

Clearly Elsevier believes that OncologySTAT will generate new revenue through advertising or sponsorship. Another possibility is that searches on OncologySTAT may lead to increased subscriptions to titles of which clinicians were not previously aware.

Apart from seeking new forms of revenue, OncologySTAT and similar sites in development are aligned with Elsevier’s mission to improve access to vital health information through print or online channels. Elsevier has always embraced its responsibility to broaden access to content, so long as the business model is economically feasible and sustainable. The company believes the sponsor-supported portal model fulfils these criteria.

Elsevier has a long history of innovation and developing new access models. The company believes OncologySTAT and other sponsor-supported portals can play a new and valuable role in expanding access to evidence-based content for professionals and opening up new revenue streams.

The relationship between sponsored and subscription content is symbiotic, in that each channel provides access to the same content, albeit in very different environments and through different tools and to different degrees. In the end, oncologists, researchers, students and librarians may care little about how a site is funded so long as it delivers useful and credible professional content.

www.oncologySTAT.com