MediaPost reports on a new Netpop report on the U.S. broadband marketplace which highlights an interesting factoid: only five percent of Web users considered to be "innovators" use mobile devices to access Web content services. Sending email is the top use, underscoring mobile devices being used as messaging platforms, content use lags far behind. One of the main reasons cited for lower use? Price. None of this is terribly surprising given real-world experiences but it does underscore the need for content providers to consider whether the content licensing deals that they have struck with many of today's mobile providers haven't stymied overall mobile content growth. The stepchild in mobile access to date has been broadband wireless services, which are subject to telecommunications carriers trying to build tiered pricing into these services - which will likely slow adoption of these services.
With a looming gap between print and online revenues many publishers are concentrating full-bore on the move to online platforms to try to shore up margins. But as print continues its decline at a decreasingly ungentle rate publishers' horizons must turn to broadband wireless services more aggressively. Apple's upcoming iPhone features a full-screen browser to make online services more consumable via mobile devices, a trend that is likely to increase demand for mobile content - if the price is right. Publishers need to step up their lobbying efforts in Washington to ensure that cost-effective broadband wireless access can come online as quickly as possible to ensure that mobile users can stay connected to the services that are most likely to help publishers supplement declining print revenues with the medium that is most likely to become the default "reading on the go" medium.
From the wilds of Scottsdale, Arizona back to the right coast via the redeye brings me to ABM's Digital Velocity event, drawing more than 230 people to learn the best practices for accelerating digital revenue growth in B2B media. The room is totally packed. Full disclosure: Shore is a member of the ABM Digital Media Council, so I have my bias as to the quality of this program, having served on the program planning committee. I think that the committee worked very hard to put together a very meaty event, and the level of attendance seems to reflect its anticipated value. I am not going to live-blog every panel, but I will be posting through the event in our events weblog and posting links here.
Information Today, Inc., Shore Communications, Inc., and respected analyst Jean Bedord recently completed an in-depth study of the dynamic enterprise search marketplace. More than 250 search professionals – users, buyers, and champions of the technology – provided unique insight into the trends driving and shaping enterprise search. This primary market research was supplemented by in-person interviews with representatives of market leading vendors. details and purchasing
A quick plane flight finds me in Scottsdale, Arizona at the seventh edition at the Buying and Selling eContent conference, a great venue that brings together the heavy hitters from both the online publishing world and the enterprise content purchasing world. This year's conference format is a lot more conversational, so I probably won't be blogging in my usual "take no prisoners" live blogging format, but will instead be providing summaries as the conference progresses. I'll post links to our events weblog here as things unfold.
Companies such as Zoominfo and Generate are using born-on-the-Web content and technologies to create business information services that are several notches above previous efforts to glean quality information from Web sites and other key sources. With an emphasis on analytics and semantic processing and business plans that are targeted towards the meat of traditional business information markets you could say that Business Information 3.0 has been born. Are traditional vendors ready to take on these well-funded BI 3.0 challengers?
CNET News and many majors go all apey over an announced distribution alliance between NBC Universal and News Corp. to provide full-length ad-supported and premium video content to media-friendly portals AOL, MSN and Yahoo. CNET and others hint at talks with Google about bringing this presumably rights-protected content into their YouTube video portal, but it sounds like speakerphone-ware at most for now. In general the whole effort sounds a little panicky and ill-formed, with partners confused about what's going to be free or not and no real details as to how this will all hang together. There are promises of user-generated content being in the mix but no sense as to how it would fit in with centrally produced video content.
At the end of the day it's probably going to be a step in the right direction for media companies to get more aggressive about building broader distribution of content with their own monetization built in to the packaging. But for all the talk about "ubiquitous" distribution it's a very limited initiative with scads of professionally-produced content well outside of the packaging schemes - including some of News Corp's and NBCU's flagship shows. It also increases the sites at which one can get content from these partners from two to a whopping...five. Wow. Bump it up to thirteen and we could fill up an old-timey television dial.
It's all a sadly inadequate response to user-generated distribution that doesn't begin to provide video the flexibility that will be required to respond to the user-generated media phenomenon. At most it's an acknowledgment that a significant portion of their audiences would be just as glad to receive programming over an Internet connection instead of a digital cable or broadcast service. This will be a plus as PCs become more integrated into home entertainment centers: why muck around with distribution deals with other partners when you can stream the programming that audiences want right to their PC/HDTV server. But a response to YouTube and other user-dominated distribution channels? Hardly.
Instead of circling the wagons of "friendlies" video producers need to face head-on the challenges of making user distribution of their content a plus rather than a frightening minus. The longer that they wait on this inevitable requirement the tighter their circle of wagons will be as the user "savages" develop increasingly flexible - and entertaining - alternatives to traditional video media. We'll see how this goes, but my bet is that in the short term it will be a fairly large ho-hum as users wait for the dust to settle around a less-than-spectacular service debut.
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.
Business information services are thriving as they gain sophisticated features to add value to their databases but they also face increasing competition on all fronts from web-sourced content and more specialized service providers. Chalk up a good score by Hoover's to fend off commoditization in its announced acquisition of First Research, a business intelligence service that serves up industry and state profiles aimed at sales professionals. First Research Call Prep Sheets are industry briefings designed to arm sales professionals with the right industry talking points before they walk out the door to accounts. State Profiles provide quarterly coverage of local issues impacting businesses in U.S. states for sales pros on the go across broad geographies.
All of this helps Hoover's to add a new layer of value-add content aimed at the sales professionals who are increasingly the core audience for many business information services. With more corporations providing an abundance of information online that can be mined easily by any number of services mere company profiles and sales contacts are not going to be sufficient for a business information provider to give their clients an industry edge. By focusing on the real-world situational needs of sales professionals via its First Research acquisition Hoover's is positioning itself more as a business intelligence solutions service that can provide complete briefings for sales professionals who need to know about not just individual accounts but as well the environment in which they play. Expect more plays like this from business information services providers - and more vendors positioning both technology and publishing services against business intelligence services in general.
The 2008 U.S. Presidential election is expected to attract more than a billion dollars in spending by some estimates, with the lion's share of that funding being funneled into media buys. But as noted by the New York Times the 2008 election is also likely to be the first election in which freely available content from candidates in social media portals will play a key factor in their media strategies. In addition to MySpace pages for candidates the presence of candid clips of candidates on YouTube turned out to play a pivotal role in key 2006 U.S. elections, providing an outlet for content that major news outlets had to cover and by doing so shape the dialogue. The New York Times today whines that all of this openness makes it difficult for candidates to shape their messages.
Yet what could be a better channel for getting your message out to the masses? Already one of the more interesting clips of the still-young 2008 campaign was concocted by an amateur, playing on a 1984 ad for Apple's Macintosh computer to the detriment of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton:
While the eventual impact of this clip is still hard to determine, it has already been viewed more than 900,000 times, not too far from the number who viewed the original Lyndon Johnson "daisy" anti-war ad in 1964's presidential campaign. If this is what one person with only the most nominal technology at their disposal can create, what could a campaign with sophisticated production equipment and messaging goals do on YouTube? Unfortunately for the campaign consultants whose fees rely in large part on placing ad buys in traditional media outlets the best buys in the 2008 may turn out to be free placements on outlets such as YouTube where the message is the star of an ad-supported show. The "daisy" ad, after all, gained most of its impact not from its original airing but from the coverage that it received as content in other ad-supported shows.
In the YouTube era it can be as important to get your message into the flow of conversation as much as to push it down people's throats with endless repetition. Services like YouTube that monetize the conversation as much as the content itself allow the "push" to come from the audience instead of the media outlet, providing a peer-level endorsement through voting and distribution that's difficult if not impossible to replicate via traditional media channels. It means, of course, a whole new spin on marketing in general: instead of creating messages that can't be questioned or voted upon YouTube and other social media outlets require marketers to create value in the midst of conversations that supply an implied endorsement far more powerfully than interrupt-driven advertising has done to date. Content finds its own level in these conversations, favoring multiple small engagements rather than high-risk big engagements.
I think that we'll see the "daisy" effect in 2008 via YouTube and other social media outlets far more than we have in past elections. Smart candidates will use their own producers to create a forest of interesting "quick-hit" messages for audiences to wade through online, and will aim their loyal followers through weblogs and email campaigns to the most popular of these messages as well as to amateur messages that seem to be resonating with voters. The most popular of these messages may wind up being promoted to broadcast media usage, reversing the flow of clips in a Current-style editorial process that allows tried and tested content to work its way towards broader audiences. The implied endorsement of these born-online broadcast ads is likely to be far more potent, as their airings will capture the attention of people who have already seen them and discussed them online and who are ready to tell their family members or friends, "Watch this, this is cool."
Ultimately this may mean lower budgets for traditional media spends, but I don't think that we're going to see a great lessening of spending in 2008 - only a more well-targeted spending that focuses more on creating online endorsements through social media more aggressively. In the long run, though, established media outlets will have to come up with new ways to make money off of political campaigns than can compete more effectively with outlets that use political ad content as free programming that can attract other ads. Politics in an era of user-driven distribution is certainly going to be a different animal.
UPDATE: The creator of the "Hillary 1984" video has been identified as Phil de Vellis, a Web developer associated with Democratic campaigns, including the Barack Obama campaign. He has resigned his position, but in an interesting post on The Huffington Post de Vellis notes "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
Pando is an increasingly popular destination for people wanting to share bulky files via email using a well-designed interface that makes it effortless to onpass content that used to be chancy to get through the typical email server's size restrictions. Pando's technology leverages infrastructure provided by BitTorrent, a popular file downloading service that makes it easy to get high-bandwidth content onto the your destktop. When Pando presented at January's SIIA Previews event I asked about whether they had thought about positioning the service for onpassing video and other forms of multimedia via a content serving model. The reps from Pando said "yes" in a rather strange and quizzical way, so I assumed that something was up.
Pando's recent announcement of media-serving capabilities seems to have confirmed my hunches - and opened up some interesting doors for those wanting to share podcasts, music and video with the world. The new Pando media tools enable media to be served up in client-side or server-side applications, kind of a NewsGator for multimedia approach to integration that will enable high-bandwidth content to integrate cleanly into any site or application design. While the underlying BitTorrent technology is nothing new, Pando's tools are making it easier than ever for publishers of any size to push out rich multimedia content without worrying about scaling issues. It's an interesting way to leverage the "that's easy" appeal of Pando's core functions into a much higher value-add relationship with content producers.
While folks like Viacom fret about the YouTubes of the world as threats there is a widening range of opportunities to work with vendors like Pando to develop publisher-friendly distribution channels for audo and video that can appeal to users who would like something better than the sometimes herky-jerky performance of the typical clip portals. What's the best way to deal with YouTube? Offer something that has more appeal and ease of use. Hmm, actually give audiences what they want in a convenient form. How novel. Pando's hardly the only game in town for good multimedia serving technology but they're lowering the bar quickly for publishers wanting to take a step into high-bandwidth services.
Ten years ago today I left a corporate attorney's office on a brilliantly sunny and warm day and opened a checking account at a local bank. The USD 100 deposit was to the order of Shore Communications Inc. To those of you who have heard the story of Shore, bear with me as I share elements which may be familiar. The to the rest of you, it's an interesting story, so stick around.
Shore actually started in the late 1970s when my then-roommate Bob Zwick and I took out a compass and applied it to a topographic map of the State of Connecticut. The Federal Communications Commission had announced a proposal to allow additional radio stations on the FM frequency spectrum. To our delight we discovered that the proposal had opened up a one-square-mile area in Old Lyme, CT where a 50,000-watt FM radio station could be built. Experienced in FM radio from our days of building and running our college radio station WCNI at Connecticut College and my selling radio advertising at WHCN, Bob and I crafted an application to build a station licensed to nearby Old Saybrook, arranged to lease land for the antenna site and engaged a Washington attorney to help shepherd through the application. The D/B/A name of the company that put in the application was Shore Communications.
Alas, in came a new administration in Washington who had friends in broadcasting not pleased with the FCC's proposal. The mile-wide hole that we had discovered zipped up quicker than you can say "political favor." Bob went on to a career in computer programming and gentleman farming while I pursued a corporate life at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, Citicorp, Quotron and Reuters.
Fast-forward to the fall of 1996 and a conference hall just south of Trafalgar Square in London. Reuters was having a staff-only conference on Web technologies and their impact on publishing. As I was involved in some of their early Web initiatives I found myself at the conference in a break hall with some PCs equipped with browsers and Internet connections. I guess that I never lost the startup bug, so it's probably no surprise that I typed "shore.com" into the browser just out of sheer curiosity. What I got back in that browser was a page of notes - something that looked like a half-forgotten site. I called the owner of the site in California and asked if I could have shore.com. The fellow said "sure." I sent him $100 just to feel like it was a real business transaction and in January of 2006 I was the proud owner of a five-letter Internet domain name for nothing more than the guts to ask for it.
A corporation to act as an umbrella for the domain seemed like a good idea, so incorporation under our old Shore moniker followed shortly thereafter. It took a while before I actually did something with it, though. I tried putting feelers out for a consulting gig about a year later while still at Reuters but the first person I spoke to - Andrew Delaney - hired me as an employee at my consulting rate for Waters Information Services, an offer that I could hardly refuse. I spent a splendid year working for Waters Information Services as head of their market research, a startup in its own right. Working in the heart of New York's SoHo district at the height of the dot-com era stimulated a lot of thoughts about Shore, though, so when new management axed market research it's no surprise that I started work on a business plan for an Internet startup focused on community publishing. An angel fund was all set to underwrite the plan in April 2000. Oops. Bad month to be thinking dot-com. But in the meantime I had launched several Web sites, one of which I sold for a tidy profit a couple of years later. Another one included an early stab at what turned out to be a weblog - little did I know.
My consulting continued but after several calls from an organization called Outsell I decided to see what they were all about. Outsell was a great experience in many ways - it showed me how to be an analyst, experience that I carrried forward into a relaunching of Shore a couple of years later as a virtual team of content industry analysts. ContentBlogger was launched along with a refreshed Shore Web site and our ShoreLines newsletter in March of 2003. Rafat Ali of paidContent.org was our number two newsletter subscriber, starting a long and warm relationship that continues to this day. A later trip to Rome gave me the honor of meeting Robin Good, who has become a wonderful friend and mentor who syndicates our content now and again to this day.
I am grateful for the dozens of clients and thousands of subscribers that Shore has serviced through the years, as well as for all of the talented and genuine team members who have been a part of our success story. I am also grateful for all of the colleagues who we have come to know through the industry events that we have attended and supported with our speaking, research and panel chairing. If there's anything that I have learned in the time that Shore has gone from a twinkling in a dreamer's eye to a widely respected research and consulting firm it's that there are an amazing number of supportive people who will stand beside you in this industry if you show some perseverance and insight. My thanks to you all. Here's to the next decade of helping content, technology and people meet in new and exciting ways.
paidContent.org has a good summary of the meat of Viacom's new lawsuit against Google claiming that the thousands of video clips being posted to Google's YouTube service are violating the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. A good analysis by CNET of exactly what in the DMCA is germane in this suit points out that the thin ice that Google is treading upon is the alleged encouraging of mass infringement of copyright - in spite of very specific statements in its terms and conditions to the contrary. Financial analyst Henry Blodget notes in his blog that most of this is about heavy-handed deal-making and the ultimate failure of Google to come to terms with Viacom in recent discussions over content use and licensing.
While the legal precedents are not strongly in favor of Viacom's view of this suit there are some important twists to consider. Though there is no user-driven revenue model for Google via YouTube as of yet it could be argued that Google is engaging in trade practices similar to what supermarkets have used oftentimes to penetrate new markets. In years past a chain wanting to dominate a given market would lower to cost of its goods to the point of losing money in that market's stores to force competitors to lose business - and eventually fold. Viacom's claim is in essence that Google set up a store and stocked stolen goods similar to their competitors and made them available at deep discounts - say, in this instance, for free. If this can be argued successfully in the courtroom Viacom has a leg to stand on.
But this argument falls apart from a few angles. First, it's a little ironic that Viacom is claiming in a USD 1 billion suit that Google is using DMCA-sanctioned "takedown" of copyrighted content is a heavy-handed tool to buy them time in negotiating licensing deals. Other media companies have managed to come to commercial terms with Google for the use of copyrighted content on YouTube: what makes Google more "evil" in its relationships with Viacom? These precedent deals for YouTube usage can be used effectively in a suit as examples that Google does indeed want to license copyrighted content lawfully.
Equally important is the question of whether Viacom has demonstrated that it has in fact tried to protect the value of its copyrighted content from duplication. If video clips are as easily "borrowed" by audiences as apples from an unattended fruit stand then the "stolen markets" issue is not easily argued - willful neglect could be argued fairly easily by the Google side. Had these clips been behind a firewall or in a DRM wrapper that Google had cracked directly, the DMCA angle on this suit would hold much more water. As it is, Viacom has no effective technology that prevents audiences from "borrowing" its online content.
The real cloud hanging over this suit, though, is the pending legislation in the U.S. Congress to revise the DMCA to allow for more generous terms of use for copyrighted content by individuals. Viacom could in theory win its courtroom battle but find itself losing the war as new laws are passed making the laws far more in line with current practice via YouTube and other social media portals. It is this pending legislation as much as any real licensing issues that are probably behind Viacom's move to sue Google. After all, if you're going to have Congressional hearings on fair use as a part of that legislation, Viacom testifying to Congress as a major suit-bringer has a more serious heft to it.
All of this boils down to one key factor: Viacom and many other media companies have given little or no thought as to how to make content automatically monetizable through social media services such as YouTube. Yes, Viacom, your copyright has been abused by some posters on YouTube, and yes, you shouldn't have to ask Google after the fact for documentation showing where content was in fact being abused, but why are companies like Viacom failing to implement tools and policies to help monetize their content more effectively? Consider Viacom's suit perhaps the last loud "bang" of anti-Google legal maneuvers - due in large part to Google's having anticipated the needs of video producers far more effectively than any other major content outlet. The case could break the other way but for today I'd bet on Google continuing its push towards video posting as it awaits reasonable action being taken by courts to validate its thinking about what makes a successful content play in today's New Aggregation.
Networking via online publishing communities is a great concept, but in very popular sites like MySpace sometimes it feels a little too public for its own good - a little like having a party in a public restroom. It's doable, but is it wise? Yet being able to choose your own crowds and conversations has great appeal, especially when there are multiple tools available with which to do so. The new social media portal Ning picks up where others have left off and creates an environment in which anyone can create their own private social media network. As with walk-up-and-publish tools like Blogger, TypePad and pbwiki Ning enables anyone to create a privately branded social network into which one can invite others to publish content such as weblog entries, videos, photos, forum discussions and live chats.
Each Ning community has its own levels of creator-defined security, so the community can be private or public or tailored to respond to a mass market of contributors or just a few select contributors. As with the Near-Time network of privately maintained weblogs, wikis and file sharing communities Ning provides a common login and top-level navigation that allows one to define and join multiple communities without having to re-enter information. This creates both a top layer of commonality and overview without giving up the unique flavor of each individual group. Features are fairly robust and very easy to use, although lacking Near-Time's Wikis, premium subscription capabilities and more professional-oriented features such as calendaring, task management and file storage.
I think that we're going to see products like Ning and Near-Time become highly successful this year in much the same way that Blogger and TypePad soared in popularity as weblogging became a popular pursuit. There is also that chicken-and-egg factor that well-designed tools can engender: will people's interest in social media beyond weblogs explode once tools that combine various social media features begin to make it easier for groups of people to express themselves to one another more effectively in private and public settings? I think so. The 57 million or so weblogs that Technorati reports being out there on the Web are just the tip of the social media iceberg. Toss in everyone that's posted a MySpace, Facebook or Orkut profile along with the explosion of Wikis and the growth social media encompasses far more rapidly expanding demographics.
In the meantime most publishers are just beginning to get comfortable with the idea that weblogs are an acceptable publishing tool for serious content. As more and more social media outlets make it easy to create highly targeted public and private audiences via professional-grade content technologies more and more page inventory that is outside the reach of their potential advertisers and subscribers is being generated. The good news is that there's nothing to stop a smart publisher from grabbing their own space in this growing mix of content technology platforms for social media - or to make a smart acquisition. Ning is still in its very early days, as are many other more sophisticated self-service publishing technologies, but expect it to begin to make waves as digital natives tire of the same-old same-old from large-scale communities and Johnny-one-note technologies and begin to define communities that are both more under their control and more interesting to their members.
CBC News reports along with many others on recent comments by Microsoft general counsel Thomas C. Rubin, an associate general counsel at the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers in New York. Key quote: "Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue." This is, of course, just the kind of sabre rattling that the AAP membership wants to hear, so they got their money's worth from Microsoft's more publisher-friendly approach. Google seems to want to keep out of direct confrontation on this issue as much as possible: offered the chance to send a representative to this week's ASIDIC 2007 Spring Meeting to talk about how to position premium content in search engines Microsoft picked up the challenge to speak to this publisher-friendly audience but Google declined.
Rubin's "red meat" speech grabbed plenty of headlines but it did little to advance any new concepts in the debate as to how publishers should approach copyright in a search-oriented online distribution environment. As a major holder of copyrighted intellectual property themselves Microsoft gains strong allies with publishers at their side in arguing for upholding strong commitments to eliminating any threats to existing business models leveraging highly protected intellectual property.
While wanting to play to a partisan crowd is an understandable temptation the characterization of Google as the copyright bad guy is oversimplified. Google's real challenge to publishers is not around copyright, which it claims it protects carefully, but rather centered on U.S. fair use policies for copyrighted content. Google has been walking a line in exposing "snippets" of copyrighted content that they claim are in line with fair use doctrines in U.S. copyright law. Their aim, they say, is to protect the right of people to know what original works of authorship are available for their use, not to duplicate those works of authorship for consumption. Immense productivity gains - and significant increases in revenues going to many publishers - stem from search engines such as Google exposing copyrighted content via fair use guidelines.
By contrast Microsoft and other publishing partners have been hard at work developing technologies designed to protect copyrighted content without fair use capabilities built into their designs. The results so far are not working well, as admitted even by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Typical DRM packages ignore fair use rights under copyright and hence circumvent the real purpose of copyright: to ensure that society is serviced by innovative ideas that will reward both those receiving those ideas and those creating those ideas.
As the U.S. Congress considers a bill introduced by representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) to make some nominal concessions in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on copying content for personal, non-profit and journalistic uses there is a glimmer of hope that technologists will recognize the fundamental importance of fair use and move away from attempts to choke it off. All this can do is to stifle innovation - and hence create a less productive society that has fewer people able to afford proprietary intellectual property. Let's hope that Rubin's remarks are just the echoes of an outlook from a fear-based approach to new outlets for intellectual property and that innovators continue to respect both copyright and fair use as means to progress a profitable and effective publishing industry.
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.
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.
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.
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While social media has become the hot trend in publishing many of the properties generating social media content are not attracting headline experts into their frays. Gather.com is addressing this by seeding leading figures from book publishing, music, heath and finance to post content and field comments on a peer basis with other Gather members. Getting experts to act as community members should not be too unfamiliar to publishers already used to organizing conferences but using experts effectively in social media outlets may require them to lay aside some preconceived notions about how experts support their publishing requirements.
