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Screen Door: How Growing Support for
Open Access Journals Challenges Content Markets |
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2 August 2004 |
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On two continents legislators in recent weeks have decided
that the benefits of publishers and aggregators taking
substantial profits for distributing publicly financed
scientific research no longer outweigh the costs to the
individuals and institutions funding that research. First
in the U.S. House of Representatives and then in the U.K.'s
Parliament, the proposals for opening up public research to
free access have already spurred Oxford Press to join the
open access journal bandwagon. Aggregators will hem and haw
and lobby all they want, but the fundamental question of
their value has been broached in ways that their clients
are not likely to let them forget. It's time for
aggregators and publishers of scientific content to
make major decisions about their futures - before the
screen door hits them on the way out of the picture. |
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According to
the
Library Journal the decision was greeted with cheers by
supporters of "open access" journals and by less than laudatory
statements from major publishers and aggregators. In a move
that is sure to engender much controversy over the next several
months the United Kingdom's Parliament Science and Technology
Committee's inquiry into publishing in the Science, Technical
and Medical (STM) sector concluded in its
report released last week that STM journals publishing the
results of publicly funded research should be made available to
the public without fees, even if it requires some government
funding of the publishing process to do so. Open access
proponents in the UK were then boosted by the same-day
announcement by the Oxford University Press to make its
prestigious
Nucleic
Acids Research journal completely available under open
access terms beginning in 2005.
This all falls on the heels of a recent
report from the US House of Representatives Appropriations
Committee recommending that research funded by the National
Institute of Health (NIH) be made freely available to the
public within six months of publishing or immediately if NIH
grant monies will cover the cost of publication - essentially
an endorsement of the NIH's earlier
report (PDF) recommending opening up access to public
research. Clearly the push is on for public research to make it
to the public that funded it without intervening subscription
profits from publishers and aggregators.
These are significant and dramatic
changes being called for and undertaken, but there are
contravening factors. At the same time that the UK is pushing
hard for open access, major European publishers still have
strong EU legislation backing their rights to publishing
databases, rights that will not be dislodged any time soon. At
the same time though there are prominent journals poking out
into the open access model, many journals, especially those
published by associations that rely upon subscription revenues
to keep their organizations viable, will continue to be slow to
shift their revenue strategies until they can assure their
survival to their satisfaction. The UK report acknowledges
these difficulties but comes out on the side of the public
benefit from free access. The message is in short, then: we
love you, dear publishers, but not so much that we would delay
real health and productivity benefits to society.
So in sum though Elsevier and other major
aggregators need not start having staff pack their boxes just
now, the major changes that the open access model have augured
for some time are about to gain significant momentum. The door
for open access may not be open fully just yet, but it's
looking a lot more like a screen door these days than a
hardened vault entry. Come 2005, the major challenges to
profitability that aggregators of scientific journals have
feared will blossom in full. To meet those challenges, what
will major aggregators and associations have to do to respond
to open access publication and other subscription-free models?
Here are a few mid-summer thoughts for them to ponder before
the chilly breeze from that screen door sets in:
- Embrace and extend - further.
It's worked for Microsoft and it works increasingly well for
many major aggregators: add value that's hard to replace
elsewhere via normalization and workflow integration
capabilities. With the increasing weakness of future
subscription revenues, though, there's a limited time frame
in which publishers of scientific journals may invest in such
capabilities and an increasing exposure to companies such as
Atypon
that specialize in providing advanced publishing capabilities
to the scientific community. Relentless client-focused
efforts to improve the value of published content in the
contexts that audiences value most is essential for future
aggregator profitability in the scientific sector and beyond.
- Build your content around communities. To date
most publishers and aggregators have paid largely lip service
to the concept of collaboration and community-developed
content as a key factor in their business models. In an
open access model, community-based content and collaboration
becomes one of the key drivers for establishing content value
and uniqueness. This concept is especially important to
associations and societies using subscription journals as the
basis for their revenues: perhaps the journal may be free,
but being able to share comments on it within a peer
community is an essential component to providing added value.
Since many freely available technologies and premium
technology platforms offer this capability already, providers
of community services must not rest on their laurels and
assume that a well-established name will provide the needed
context to gain community respect. The experience must
provide superior value or it will be ignored.
- Knuckle down and examine your business model
carefully. Major aggregators of scientific research will
not disappear, but the long road towards accepting that their
marketplace is diminishing rapidly in scope and depth on a
permanent basis may be reaching an end. Making
subscription-oriented databases only more gargantuan to
ensure large contracts has not addressed the most significant
trend towards trying to "right-size" content purchases much
as any other component in the supply chain consumed by major
institutions. Normalizing content into XML formats and
providing friendly user applications are important steps but
they no longer suffice to deter challenges to the basic
premise of en masse content database purchases.
Databases are technology platforms, not marketing tools; the
time to make that distinction more clearly has arrived.
In the New Aggregation, as Shore terms it, there are
solutions that lead to a more serene future for major content
aggregators (a new report on this topic to be released
shortly), but they all revolve around one core premise:
publishing, while still a noble art, is no longer a mystery to
the masses equipped with powerful publishing technologies. Any
solution that tries to deny that basic premise is doomed to
fail sooner rather than later. Legislators in two major nations
have decided that it's no longer cost-effective for society as
a whole to deny this fundamental shift if science is to thrive
and yield its benefits effectively. The screen door is poised
to hit a few players on the way out of the picture if they
don't accept that the time for fundamental changes to the
premium content aggregation model has arrived at last.
-
John Blossom
click here for related research on Open Access publishers
from Shore Senior Analyst Christine Lamb
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