Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference. Data, data, data!

This is the third in a series of reflections on the 2012 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, book now to secure your place at the 2013 conference.

Data, data, data

Though not an explicit theme of the conference, speaker after speaker emphasized the need for scholarly publishers to be on top of the information they have, or should have, about the behaviours of their users and customers. Mark Ware enjoined us to use extreme analytics to make sense of the customer and user data we have, indispensable for business-to-business companies but equally important fort the rest of us. Tom Taylor, talking about global consortia and library markets, suggested that consortia deals continue to be healthy and renewed provided we understand the local factors across the world that influence decisions: investment or retrenchment in education and research, general economic climate, open or closed consortia, political stability or lack of it and, of course, direct customer contact and service.

Matt Rampone in the mobile session urged publishers to invest in analysis of their readers. Forcefully, Charlie Rapple encouraged them to get to know their audiences, articulate questions they want answered before doing market research: what are the users actually doing, what devices do they use, what are their problems: evidence-based strategy formulation!

And, as Tracy Gardner of Simon Inger Consulting reminded everyone, there is the fourth scholarly publishing survey, currently in progress, that will be required reading when it comes out.

Open access

The Budapest Open Archives Initiative is 10 years old. Pressure from researchers, funding bodies and governments on publishers to open up access to their information has been intense and has even spilled over into the daily press. Although open access journals are not new, progress has been slow as publishers struggle with the new business models required to make sense of them. The green OA model – author deposit in institutional or other repositories after an embargo period – has been most in evidence, with funding agencies increasingly mandating this. The main argument here then is over the embargo period, ranging from 6 to 18 months.

This is the model chosen by the World Bank for its publications, a relatively small part of the work of the world’s largest development agency, so the business impact of open access is not too severe. For Springer, one of the largest STM publishers, the situation is quite different. Nevertheless, Springer has been moving gradually towards green open access, as Wim van der Stelt explained, helped by the acquisition of BioMed Central in 2008. Springer Open has 100 journals across all subject areas, has 405 members in 46 countries, includes books, and 15% of Springer articles are now open access. The embargo period is 12 months. Price adjustments are made even for selected hybrid journals depending on their OA content. Prices may go up as well as down and they “do make money”.

“Don’t forget: Open Access is just a business model, so keep up with your traditional services.” Wim van der Stelt

Wim advised doubters to be courageous and provide hybrid options, transfer subscription journals to open access, start sister journals and sponsored journals and launch fully open access new journals; also be creative with financial models for society journals, for example reducing or forgiving charges to members for one or more of their papers.

Gold Open Access – fully open access from publication, with authors paying a publication charge – has been slower to get off the ground although there are some early gold OA journals that are now quite well established. Three things have helped to accelerate development. Firstly there has been a gradual increase in the publication charge to a level that now makes business sense. Secondly, some funding agencies have agreed to pay the charge out of research grants. Finally, governments have slowly begun to shift policies, most notably the British government which accepted the recommendations of the Finch report, supporting gold OA, earlier this year, The European Union - green with six month embargo or gold without agreement on funding - has yet to be as bold, and things are not moving very rapidly in the USA either.

Whatever the outcome, the social sciences will move at different speed than the physical ones because of different funding arrangements.  The transition will also bring new administrative issues for author publication charges by institutions as the system migrates, particularly with authors from different institutions.

Freemium: a new business model?

Disruptive as the open access model may appear, as yet it has not yet led to fundamental change in the economics of scholarly publishing. As Mary Waltham pointed out, E-Biomed which morphed into PubMed Central was launched in 1999 to fierce opposition from publishers. Yet progress towards full open access has been quite slow and, as Thomas Taylor reminded us, the subscription based consortia model continues to be strong. At the same time, Cameron Neylon cautioned, in the long term there isn’t much money in controlling access to content, but there is a lot of money in tools and platforms to enable access. This is an opportunity for publishers to produce premium services.

How this might work was illustrated by Xavier Cazin of Immateriél, drawing on actual e-book sales experiences in France. Immateriél  has found that public domain books often sell at a price, OECD books sell at £11.99 through a bookshop even though they are free from the OECD website and discount offers bring in extra revenue even though the content value does not change. What customers are willing to pay for is ease of access: easy from where I am, readable on my current device, easy navigation through content. They are also prepared to pay for reading rewards: rich and well designed environment, content and curation appropriate to my current needs and sharing functionalities. The two combine to give ‘reading comfort’ which relates directly to the price people are prepared to pay. It follows that there is a job to do for publishers: find out exactly, for your content and your customers, what you need to do to produce products and services that provide this reading comfort.

The model of free+premium = freemium is a combination of a large, addressable audience whose needs we identify through analytics, to whom we offer free versions with a clear value but also premium offers with added value.

Kurt Paulus, 2012
Book now for the 2013 conference.

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference. Key changes, challenges and opportunities

This is the second in a series of reflections on the 2012 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, book by Friday 9 August to avoid the late booking fee.

Key changes, challenges and opportunities

Change is all around us yet the constants traditionally underpinning scholarly publishing largely remain in place: quality control, trusted brands, citability, even mainstream business models like the big deal. Perhaps reassured by that, we can afford to be less fearful when confronting the many changes that are coming our way. There is pressure from governments to review copyright legislation. Governments and funding agencies want to see much more open access than we have been willing to entertain until recently. Technical changes, not necessarily designed with publishers’ needs in mind, are racing ahead and we are forced to go with the flow.


We sometimes forget that our customers also face change. Librarians confront technical and resource constraints and increasingly have to demonstrate how they add value. Authors and readers suffer severe time constraints and have to change their workflows to be most effective. Both need our help. Change is now a constant yet publishers’ reactions can be coloured by fear of it, causing them to cling to outdated models and overlook the undoubted opportunities that change brings with it. ‘Disruptive technologies’ can have a positive impact.

Mobile

Mobile technologies and social networking techniques are ubiquitous and all around us. The growth of consumer-focused mobile technologies such as tablets and smart phones did not initially alert us to the benefits that this might bring to scholarly publishing. Researchers are also consumers, however, and increasingly demand access to their information wherever they might be.

“The scholarly article in 140 characters? No!” Plenary 2 title

While publishers may have been slow off the mark, mobile access is increasing and ‘Apps’ are springing up apace.  Matt Rampone of HighWire gave an overview: in the UK in August this year, over 13% of total online use was via mobile – smartphones, tablets and also e-readers. iOS is the dominant operating system with Android coming up fast. PDF is the format of choice for readers. Average time spent on a site is about 50s (a little longer for a selection of Apps). Mobile usage has a doubling time of 12 months! Rampone’s advice:

• Invest in mobile.
• Invest in analytics (know your readers).
• Create good experiences.

It is fairly clear that publishing on mobile platforms does not yet require a rebirth of the scholarly article but is essential if publishers are to keep pace with readers’ changing behaviours and does give the opportunity to organize and present content in new ways. We mustn’t forget, Tom Reding of BBC Worldwide reminded us, that we are in the business of insight, not journals. The carrot for embracing change is that mobile users are more willing to pay for additional services than desktop users.

Mark Ware’s presentation based on a series of case studies carried out for Outsell confirmed that publishing to mobile platforms is increasingly settling in with STM publishers, starting with the medical and healthcare areas but spreading more widely. The publishers involved included BMJ, Elsevier, Nature, OUP, Wiley-Blackwell and others. Beyond the technical and presentational issues are business ones such as authentication of a user who wants to access a website from a mobile device from within their institution or while on the move. The solutions for RSC Mobile and Oxford Journals Mobile are slightly different for example, and no doubt evolving in response to reader reaction.

Discoverability

There is a data deluge in scholarly publishing, suggested Sophia Ananiadou, chairing one session: information overload, but is that the right metaphor? The deluge is a feature of a system where increased research funding leads to increased publishable output and, even with the most rigorous peer review, to  a growing mountain of stored information. How do we retrieve the stuff we need to progress research further?

“The problem is not information overload, nor filter failure; it is discovery deficit.” Cameron Neylon following Clay Shirky

The issue is not a new one but the scale is, according to Harry Kaplanian, who took us back to card catalogues and OPACs before moving on to more contemporary techniques of finding and retrieving information. We have since moved on to web search, standard references, author generated key words, metadata, A&I services and aggregators to make searches more exhaustive and reliable. A lot is being learned and there is an increasing convergence. Publishers need to be prepared to serve a variety of reader types looking for information through a number of different ‘discovery channels’ (Simon Inger), and need to be on top of their user statistics so that they can better serve their readers and also share their user data with librarians to support their case (value added again).

Oxford University Press has its own Director of the Discoverability Programme, Robert Faber, charged with increasing discoverability of all OUP content across subject areas. This includes among others:

• Free content outside the paywall – abstracts, keywords etc
• Improved MARC programmes
• Enhanced linking between products and services
• New mobile sites for Oxford Journals
• Optimized search engines
• New approaches to library discovery services
• Analytic tools for tracking user behaviour.

At the top of the tree is the Oxford index, a standardized description of every item of content in one place, an evolving Oxford interface and a way to create links and relationships between content elements.

We are beginning to move towards text and data mining, from a single publisher’s output towards the whole growing corpus of accumulated information, i.e. from looking for a single needle in one haystack to finding a collection of compatible needles in a whole field of haystacks. Anita de Waard, Director of Disruptive Technologies at Elsevier set the scene by talking about working with biologists on how scientists read, how computers read and how they might come together to discover relevant and reliable information rather than just isolated research papers. She sees an evolving future of research communication where researchers compile data, add metadata, overlay the whole thing with workflow tools, then create papers from this material in Google.doc accessible to editors and reviewers, all in the ‘cloud’. Publishers? – we provide the tools!

John McNaught from the National Centre for Text Mining illustrated some of the techniques for adding more value to discovery: natural language searching, searching for acronyms, checking for language nuances, looking for associations, all designed to peel away layer upon layer of increasing complexity to turn unstructured text into structured content linked to other knowledge.

“The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members.” Metcalfe’s law

Networking and the semantic web continue to be buzzwords. Information is dispersed in many different places. To make sense of it we need structure and context, a resource description framework that identifies objects and connects them, and the appropriate vocabulary. Knowledge networks – associated communities that work on specific topics, linking to move on to a different level – are the next level up from networks of individual papers and reports, according to Stefan Decker.

So what’s the problem?

All this is fascinating work going on at the moment in academic or similar institutions. So will all our problems be solved soon? Not in a hurry, according to Cameron Neylon of PLoS, unless publishers change their ways. The majority of publishers behave as broadcasters of information and are still not thinking of networks of people and tools. The tools publishers have provided are not adequate, and often licences prohibit text mining of material to which the reader already has access. This is an opportunity for publishers to produce premium services. The hardware tools – mobile devices – are already available and are powerful.

“Publishers are too focused on controlling access.” Cameron Neylon

The bottom line for all these speakers is open access, that is having metadata and full text freely accessible with licensing arrangements that permit text mining, if the dream of improved discoverability for researchers is to be achieved. If there is a straw in the wind pointing to how publishers policies may develop it is the recent agreement by ALPSP, STM and the Pharma Documentation Ring (PDR) on a new clause for the PDR Model Licence:

“Text and Data Mining (TDM): download, extract and index information from the Publisher’s Content to which the Subscriber has access under this Subscription Agreement. Where required, mount, load and integrate the results on a server used for the Subscriber’s text mining system and evaluate and interpret the TDM Output for access and use by Authorized Users. The Subscriber shall ensure compliance with Publisher's Usage policies, including security and technical access requirements. Text and data mining may be undertaken on either locally loaded Publisher Content or as mutually agreed.”

Similar sentiments, though in the context of mobile delivery, were expressed by Charlie Rapple later in the conference. Getting quite used to trying to shake audiences out of complacency, Charlie claimed that our users are not happy with us: we have not evolved products and services in line with how they have evolved. New ways of creating, evaluating, curating and distributing information are all around us. We need to win our users back or we will go out of business: if we don’t, someone else will take over!

“Our audience and their needs should direct our strategy.” Charlie Rapple

Critically this means starting with the audience rather than content or devices on which content is delivered. Find out what users need; look into and understand their workflows; deconstruct our content and integrate it with these workflows, making it interactive, relevant and ‘friction-free’.

Kurt Paulus, 2012
Book by Friday 9 August to avoid the late booking fee.

ALPSP Conference Day 2: The scholarly article in 140 characters? Are you a denial-o-saur?

Leon Heward-Mills introduces the session

Digital technology, particularly mobile, is changing the way we access and read information - perhaps even in the way we use different parts of our brains - for problem solving rather than 'deep-reading'. The Scholarly Article in 140 Characters session explored implications of this for consumers, publishers and the research community.

Matt Rampone from HighWire Press kicked off with a summary of mobile trends, data and the impact on STM publishing from their own user data. The information comes from 12 months of data from a wide range of publishers they work with and provides a snapshot of an aggregate study.

Mobile usage as a percentage of total online usage in the US is 10.58% and in the UK is 13.16% at August 2012 and based on smart phones, tablets, eReaders, with iPad 85% of tablet market share. Site use by page views can be broken down as:

• 82% content
• 9% home page
• 4% search
• 3% current issue
• 2% ahead of print.

The visits by operating system are split by 69% by iOS, 30% by Android, and 1% by BlackBerry. Mobile website usage trends are going up. People are finding the sites and coming back. Where smaller publishers - who publish once a month - have mobile apps, they found that users were coming back showing real engagement with a mobile platform. The median time for mobile website browsing is 90 seconds.

People spend more time reading with a tablet. With a smart phone they spend less time reading, perhaps because it is not as comfortable a reading environment? PDFs are more lately starting to trend downwards and - unsurprisingly - they are non-existent on the smart phone.

Matt's key recommendations:

1. invest in mobile (mobile optimised websites first)
2. invest in analytics
3. focus on creating good experiences: more tools and better end experience.

Charlie Rapple from TBI Communications - who wins the prize for best slide of the conference - provided a wake-up call for those who won't rethink their content strategy in light of new digital technologies. Content still tends to be long form, text based and not very dynamic. As an industry we've got into the mindset of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Slide of the conference: denial-o-saurs

But are users happy? What they want is changing, but we’re not really recognising and responding to this. One reason is that we haven’t evolved our product or service to the extent to which they have evolved. The risk is that we will lose market share to disruptor players. Does that mean that as an industry we are denial-o-saurs?

We need to consider how long we can win the battle of mind share. We need to win our users back and get better at meeting user needs by reconnecting, re-engaging, and rebuilding relationships with readers and stakeholders. The transition to online wasn't a revolution, but mobile and social may well be. So let's go back to basic principles - the audience and their need - to direct strategy and rethink core value proposition. We need to make better use of mobile technology.

Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs claimed that mobile technology is “not just a way to do old things while moving... a way to do things that couldn’t be done before.”

We should think about what we can gain from deconstructing the article in terms of information and workflow. There is potential to meet reader/customer needs in the right place, at the right time with interactive, relevant and friction-free content. Charlie has a simple equation to work to:

right information + right place + right time = value

What she wants - and is starting - to see is user experience being less passive with a better sense of how it is contributing to their work and therefore the value. Mobile is really contributing to this. For publishers, the key is to get close enough to users to understand and get to know audiences. It doesn't have to be difficult or expensive: you can do desk research, analyse data - you don't need a huge budget. Having a crack in-house is better than not doing anything. An initial bit of work will help you really articulate the questions you need answers to.

You can combine general information from desk research with more focused research you do yourself. Take the general information (e.g. smart phone take-up) with own (user analysis of device type) and also ask really specific questions (e.g. problems that preclude smart phone use: security, confidentiality, connectivity?) Then compare the reality of what is happening with your site and your users to compare perception versus actual behaviour. Consider user observation and it is useful to probe and explore in more detail initial findings of your survey.

Citing an example from one of TBI's recent clients, one interesting finding from this approach was that as much use of professional information happens outside work while commuting or at home. This had implications for the structure and presentation of content with unexpected insights and inspiration. For example, expect the previously unexpected: medics can now use mobiles in the air in the US. This resulted in a medical app being used to save a life on a plane.

Nick Bilton in his latest book I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works suggests we need to make time and space to make innovation happen. Another contemporary theorist, Steven Johnson talks about the “collision of slow hunches”. It's about focusing your efforts, setting and prioritising objectives, as well as embracing and planning for change. Move away from thinking about content to thinking about customers and it will have an impact on every department.

Rapple's vision comprises a roadmap:

1. audience research and segmentation
2. brainstorm problems and solutions
3. prioritise audiences and objectives
4. prepare staff and processes for change.

Despite having to follow the awesome denial-o-saurs, Tom Reding from BBC Worldwide charmed and informed the audience in equal measure with multi-media highlights from key BBC brands (Top Gear and Doctor Who anyone?) as well as some fabulous merchandise giveaways. His was a view from outside of the scholarly publishing industry, one that could provide fresh insight or some new ideas.

BBC Worldwide drives revenue to go back into creative sector and BBC.com has over 50 million users a month. Digital is important because it’s about the money. New revenue streams are driven through new digital channels, new production and cost savings. Digital also opens up new markets. It gives them a closer relationship with audience and engages fans across platforms. But one of the biggest reasons they focus on digital is to stay relevant.

Their teenage audience watch their content exclusively online so they need to unlock that content and seek new value. Areas to consider are:

• the business of free
• getting closer to your users
• new partnerships
• gamification and serious games (new trend)

In one of the more interesting comparisons of the day Redin observed that the cross-platform chunked up and down content for Top Gear isn't too disimilar to what you can do with an article. He advised us to step away from our content. We’re in the business of insight NOT journals. Remember that mobile users are more willing to pay for services than desktop users as they value convenience and immediacy.

A move to digital means more than re-versioning. Sweat your assets, distribute as far as you can, but get to the core of your offer which is insight. Explore new media platforms. Think about the business of free: with marginal cost of production and market factors pushing to ‘free’ can you adopt the free + premium = freemium model? If you scrutinise your sales, you’ll likely find you make your money from 10-20% of your audience. For BBC Worldwide, the rest get it free. It's a classic Pareto Principle model. So consider if freemium will work for you.

He suggested that with a large adddressable audience (250k knowledge workers) and a free version with clear value (the abstract), a premium offer with added value using user analytics (build or partner) and an optimised conversion funnel (build or partner) can demonstrate your confidence in your product.

If 13% of paying users are providing 51% of revenue, create products that cater to this audience and allows them to spend their money. Closing insights included:

• dig deep beneath the Google analytics as they are a free and powerful way to inform your marketing budget
• measure results and iterate
• try things out e.g. work with companies such as Semantico, Mendeley etc
• content still remains king - make the best content and you will get the best users
• look at gamification: take a gaming approach and apply it to none-game situations e.g. FoldIt - Solve Puzzles for Science.

Redin closed with a charming illustration of how gamification and playfulness can inspire mission-type behaviour. The Bottle Bank Arcade form The Fun Theory. It's pretty inspiring stuff.