Digital Business Models

The evolution of long standing publishign models is continuing and there are pressures on the underlying business models. What different business models have developed? What opportunities do they present? How have they evolved across books and journals?

The Digital Business Models panel at the ALPSP Conference provided different perspectives on what's new and developing in this area. Chaired by Laura Ceballos Watling from CEDRO, speakers included Jose Fossi, Vice President of Client Services for PubFactory, O'Reilly Media, Phill Jones, Director of Publishing Innovation at Digital Science, and Dr Julia von dem Knesebeck, Found of Open Publishing GmbH.



The ALPSP Conference was held at the Park Inn Heathrow in London on 14-16 September 2016. View the different sessions on the ALPSP YouTube channel.

Reflections on #alpsp15 - Digital Science's Phill Jones explores the key issues

Phill Jones, Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science, reflects on the duelling keynote talks from Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar and Kuansan Wang, Director, Internet Service Research Center at Microsoft Research in this blog post reflecting on the 2015 ALPSP Conference. He noted their very different views on academic discovery on the open web.

"Citing the difference between "general" search for say a local business, and the geographically global nature of "academic" search, Acharya suggested that personalizing Google scholar wouldn’t yield much additional value. Conversely, Wang described a very different philosophy of highly monitored, highly personalized search through Bing and Cortana that would adapt to individual users needs."

He reflects on the shift in customer base from library to researcher and the resulting revelations as publishers try to better understand their needs:

"Google is so firmly embedded in young researcher’s routines that they don’t even think about the fact that they use it. You wouldn’t expect somebody to tell you that they opened an internet browser, would you?" 

The panel on peer review provoked the following thought:

"One reoccurring theme that emerged from the discussions: the fact too much is currently being asked of the peer-review process. With the mantra of "publish or perish" being truer now than it’s ever been, it can be argued that publishers find themselves unwittingly in the position of administering the process that decides whose career advances and whose doesn’t."

With that position comes great responsibility, something that will no doubt be considered in more detail during Peer Review Week to be held 28 September to 2 October 2015, a collaboration between ORCID, OpenScience and Wiley announced by Alice Meadows during the conference.

Read Phill's full post here on the Digital Science blog.

The publisher as technology company

Phill Jones from Digital Science

Phill Jones, Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science, asked the audience to consider whether publishers need to become technology companies to succeed in today's market?

Information technology has changed everything. A crucial point in time was when telephones and computers collided.  Another key point is when television and the internet collided (think NetFlix). Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder of Netscape and Andreeson Horowitz, came up with the phrase "software eats the world." This is when software is developed into something that heavily disrupts an industry. That is what is happening to our industry. Publishing is changing because it is colliding with information technology.

Who are the most powerful players in publishing? Google, Amazon, Apple. One is an advertising company, one is an online retailer, one is an device manufacturer. What they all have in common is IT.

With science, what is happening now is a transformation from a cottage industry approach to industrial size. Things are on a much larger scale with a range of researchers tackling one part of the research project each. The technologies of choice in the lab lag behind. Post-It notes still prevail.

Another key driver is the change in policy (e.g. Neelie Kroes in the EU through to the NIH compliance where they moved to remove grants from researchers who didn't comply with OA requirements).

There is an evaluation gap. Traditional measures of impact don't take into account funders; requirements to measure impact including societal impact, public engagement and legislative impact. As publishers, we need to be aware of this.

Where does this leave us? The publisher as technology company? When content and technology collide you basically get Open Science. The different stages of research include: getting the idea, doing the research, documenting findings, output and dissemination, maximising return on researcher investment.

There are opportunities to use technology to help with each one of these stages. That is the space that publishers should inhabit. How do you go about this to add value? Digital Science focuses on investment in young companies that have solutions to problems in the science space. To understand what the problems are, they have a consultancy division who undertake research.

Phill Jones chaired the ALPSP seminar Disruption, development and divestment held in London on Tuesday 17 March 2015.

Don’t let disruption scare you, it’s just another word for opportunity

Don't be scared, it's only disruption

Phill Jones is Head of Publisher Outreach at Digital Science. Here, in a guest post, he argues that disruption isn't scary...

"For publishers, societies and other stakeholders in scholarly communication, innovation and its scarier sibling, disruption can be seen either as a threat, a challenge, or as an opportunity. Particularly for smaller players, it can be very tough to look at the innovation landscape with it’s plethora of technologies, start-up companies and initiatives and decide just where to invest valuable time and effort, not to mention development budget.

The problem doesn't begin and end with technology either. Business models are evolving and the nature of sales channels is beginning to change. At the recent Association of Subscription Agents conference in London, Derk Haank, CEO of Springer, pointed out that in the past 4 years, the journal market share for subscription agents has fallen from 54% to 40%. That’s a massive shift in such a short time. Particularly in light of the recent SWETS bankruptcy, it’s important to go beyond thinking about revenue sources and try to figure out what the sales and revenue channels of the future may be.

On the 17th of March, I'm going to be chairing a seminar for ALPSP at SCI in London titled Disruption, Development and Divestment where we’re going to try to get at some of these complex questions. In the mean-time, here are some of my own thoughts about the state of innovation and what’s next. These may or may not reflect the opinions of the other speakers, you’ll have to come along to find out.

There’s more to platform innovation than user experience

Platform innovation can get a bit of a bad name. The traditional view of web design, focusing on stickiness and design layout can often be dismissed as mere bells and whistles. The persistence of the PDF as the dominant container for academic articles supports this view but is this finally beginning to change? Platform innovation that makes a difference adds real value in the form of new functionality and information. Data sharing, altmetrics, and multi-media all represent new but very real needs of today's authors and readers.

If you want to know what authors will need next, follow the money

Academic researchers are pressed for time and like it or not, they’d actually far prefer to be in the lab, the field, or the library doing research than sat at a computer figuring out how to upload a data set or even write an article (at least that’s true for most of them). So why do researchers communicate at all? Because funders insist that they do so. For some reason, they feel that they’re entitled to proof that their money is being spent wisely. Emboldened by the growth of open access publishing, that has in part been driven by mandates, funders are increasingly asking authors and institutions to communicate in new and diverse ways. In short, funder mandates and funding preferences dictate author needs.

Open access won’t be the last new business model to make an impact

With the role of the subscription agent under threat due to falling margins and market share, the question of what the intermediary of the future will look like is becoming pressing. The major players in the space are already pivoting to become more like technology providers and technology providers are creating connections throughout the industry that organically lead to new distribution channels. What will these new revenue sources and channels look like? Well that remains to be seen, but some people have been arguing for some time that publishers can identify sources of revenue outside of selling licensed content.

My three predictions above pose more questions than they answer. Innovation is a complex subject and there are many questions still to be addressed when it comes to open access, open science, data publication, business models and sustainability. On March 17th, myself and a number of wiser speakers than I will try to get to the bottom of some of it. We’ll try to put some of this into perspective and hopefully, there will be some take-home lessons that will help put all this scary talk of disruption into perspective.

See you in London."

Book online for Disruption, Development and Divestment.

Follow coverage on the day via Twitter #alpspdisruption