Comment Novel publisher biz models and revenue streams (Score 1) 213
As a few others have mentioned in this thread...
Many very important research articles are now unavailable to the public who pays the salaries and associated costs for researchers and their many colleagues down to the level of undergrads and summer research students to:
The public which largely has no access to the product - via the process described above - is essentially supplying the capital to power the current publisher business models largely - as others have said here - providing services (online publishing frameworks; bureaucratic support for the editorial staff; distribution networks to get the final product to the customers) that now-a-days can nearly be performed by a few sharp, motivated college students in their spare time, if the final distributed product were electronic only (e.g., if creating hard-copies of articles were left to the purchaser/reader).
Historically, what gave rise to this current situation?
Coincident with the accelerating government investment in science and engineering that grew during and after WWII, the number of scienctific, technical, and medical (STM) manuscripts began to grow way beyond what the typical professional society not-for-profit publisher could contend with. During the 50's & 60's, as the printing industry began to digitize, these same society publishers were strapped not only to cope with the editorial burden, but also the technical burden of linking in to increasingly digital print workflows.
Larger, for-profit publishing concerns could leverage economies of scale to handle both the increase in manuscripts as well as the need for advanced IT practices in handling that last step in the process (sending electronic proofs to the printer to create hard-copy for distribution). It was at this point - taking advantage of a market need - many of the publishers now charging these large subscription fees came into inheriting the responsibility for documenting and disseminating the collective knowledge of modern civilization - and locked in some significant profits (as sub prices have risen over the last 50 years) based on the value of this service to society.
So - as many have pointed out - these constraints and requirements that brought the publishers into the business have gradually melted away due to the rise both of ubiquitous, richly functional digital word processing & desktop publishing tools and the growth of the web in mid-to-late 1990s as a ubiquitious and user friendly platform for publishing information. Most of those former advantages the publishers had over the smaller publishers (and individuals) regarding the layout, publishing, and dissemination of research articles have disappeared.
As many others have said on this thread, it's a given now the raw published articles (in HTML, PDF, OOXML, etc.) have become very low value commodities. It doesn't make economic sense such commodities which the former slave labor (researchers/reviewers/editors) can fairly easily produce without any assistance from the publishers be able to support large, locked-in revenue streams.
Given that is the case, the question that remains is:
What will the NEW value-added services be that can enable the publishers to continue to make a living into the future?
This is not a new question. It is one that at least the more technically-oriented members of the academic library community have been asking quite publicly for well over a decade now.
Certainly - powerful search systems synergistically combining old-fashioned, text-based lexical indexing (IR & LSI), newer natural language-processing techniques, and use of structured knowledge frameworks (i.e., from controlled vocabularies such as MeSH and SNOMED on through fully expressed description logic ontologies in OWL) can help to turn these commodity text containers into a richly mine-able knowledgebase - one that could turn the legacy of the last 150+ years of the STM published content into a productive repository for knowledge discovery not unlike the way bioinformatics researchers continue to convert repositories of nucleotide & amino acid sequences (and structures) into a rich mine of valuable knowledge.
A lot of work in this realm (call it STM literature informatics) has been going on in the research domain for over 3 decades now (e.g., google on Text REtrieval Conference [TREC] and BioNLP for just a few examples of MANY). Much work in the realm of digital library development also seeks to maximize effective use of technologize to maintain and extend our intellectual heritage in accessible, electronic form. To fully extract and inter-relate ALL the embedded knowledge is very tough, and many technical obstacles remain, but each year, more useful techniques emerge from this community (e.g., GoPubMed).
The question is how quickly will STM publishers be able to re-organize their business models so that they no longer depend on locked-down intellectual property in PDF & HTML files as their primary revenue stream?
Three related points:
Many very important research articles are now unavailable to the public who pays the salaries and associated costs for researchers and their many colleagues down to the level of undergrads and summer research students to:
- read the literature and stay current with the new knowledege accruing and the opportunity gaps
- write the grants
- design the experiements
- order the required equipment/reagents
- perform the experiments
- reduce/analyze the results
- iterate back to re-do or extend some of the experiments
- summarize the analysis in the context of the current literature
- prepare & submit the manuscripts
- organize incoming manuscripts during the editorial process
- solicit reviews
- do the reviewing
- pay the page fees
- pay the institutional overhead fees to cover the subscription costs.
The public which largely has no access to the product - via the process described above - is essentially supplying the capital to power the current publisher business models largely - as others have said here - providing services (online publishing frameworks; bureaucratic support for the editorial staff; distribution networks to get the final product to the customers) that now-a-days can nearly be performed by a few sharp, motivated college students in their spare time, if the final distributed product were electronic only (e.g., if creating hard-copies of articles were left to the purchaser/reader).
Historically, what gave rise to this current situation?
Coincident with the accelerating government investment in science and engineering that grew during and after WWII, the number of scienctific, technical, and medical (STM) manuscripts began to grow way beyond what the typical professional society not-for-profit publisher could contend with. During the 50's & 60's, as the printing industry began to digitize, these same society publishers were strapped not only to cope with the editorial burden, but also the technical burden of linking in to increasingly digital print workflows.
Larger, for-profit publishing concerns could leverage economies of scale to handle both the increase in manuscripts as well as the need for advanced IT practices in handling that last step in the process (sending electronic proofs to the printer to create hard-copy for distribution). It was at this point - taking advantage of a market need - many of the publishers now charging these large subscription fees came into inheriting the responsibility for documenting and disseminating the collective knowledge of modern civilization - and locked in some significant profits (as sub prices have risen over the last 50 years) based on the value of this service to society.
So - as many have pointed out - these constraints and requirements that brought the publishers into the business have gradually melted away due to the rise both of ubiquitous, richly functional digital word processing & desktop publishing tools and the growth of the web in mid-to-late 1990s as a ubiquitious and user friendly platform for publishing information. Most of those former advantages the publishers had over the smaller publishers (and individuals) regarding the layout, publishing, and dissemination of research articles have disappeared.
As many others have said on this thread, it's a given now the raw published articles (in HTML, PDF, OOXML, etc.) have become very low value commodities. It doesn't make economic sense such commodities which the former slave labor (researchers/reviewers/editors) can fairly easily produce without any assistance from the publishers be able to support large, locked-in revenue streams.
Given that is the case, the question that remains is:
What will the NEW value-added services be that can enable the publishers to continue to make a living into the future?
This is not a new question. It is one that at least the more technically-oriented members of the academic library community have been asking quite publicly for well over a decade now.
Certainly - powerful search systems synergistically combining old-fashioned, text-based lexical indexing (IR & LSI), newer natural language-processing techniques, and use of structured knowledge frameworks (i.e., from controlled vocabularies such as MeSH and SNOMED on through fully expressed description logic ontologies in OWL) can help to turn these commodity text containers into a richly mine-able knowledgebase - one that could turn the legacy of the last 150+ years of the STM published content into a productive repository for knowledge discovery not unlike the way bioinformatics researchers continue to convert repositories of nucleotide & amino acid sequences (and structures) into a rich mine of valuable knowledge.
A lot of work in this realm (call it STM literature informatics) has been going on in the research domain for over 3 decades now (e.g., google on Text REtrieval Conference [TREC] and BioNLP for just a few examples of MANY). Much work in the realm of digital library development also seeks to maximize effective use of technologize to maintain and extend our intellectual heritage in accessible, electronic form. To fully extract and inter-relate ALL the embedded knowledge is very tough, and many technical obstacles remain, but each year, more useful techniques emerge from this community (e.g., GoPubMed).
The question is how quickly will STM publishers be able to re-organize their business models so that they no longer depend on locked-down intellectual property in PDF & HTML files as their primary revenue stream?
Three related points:
- The various professional library associations (e.g., ALA, ARL, SPARC, etc.) and - more recently - the CreativeCommons (and ScienceCommons) have been working on encouraging such changes for quite some time now.
- In additional to the PubMed Central archive earmarked in the pending U.S. Congressional bill, an enormous number of digital archive efforts are dedicated to providing long-term access to STM research publications (see the following list compiled by HighWire Press - http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/largest.dtl).
- There are still MANY society, not-for-profit publishers that really do struggle financially. These not only provide a very valuable service in disseminating researcher results from specific scientific and engineering domains, they also play a vital role in maintaining the coherency of the professional research societies to which they are attached. As I mention above, many of these societies pre-date the time when some of the for-profit publishers stepped in to "lend a helping hand". Considerable thought needs to be given to how future business models for STM publishing can be found that work for these much smaller players, many of whom have very significant publishing operations - e.g., the Society for Neuroscience, the American Physical Society, etc.. In fact, the APS, SfN and others have been very significant players in pioneering novel ways to use digital publishing technology and the net/web to help better meet the publishing and knowledge retrieval requirements of their society's members.
