Wendy Warr, STM on the advance, Information World Review, December 5, 2008. Excerpt:
...[The pharmaceutical industry and STM publishing] both have a history of high profit margins and double-digit growth. Both are now under threat....[P]ublishers are threatened by the explosion in free internet services and open access.
When times get hard, there are two key strategies: cost cutting and investing in innovation....Alas, it is often cost cutting that wins, rather than the alternative, courageous option....
A more surprising move by CAS is its announcement that it will work with Wikipedia to help provide accurate CAS registry numbers for current substances listed in the Wikiprojects-Chemicals section of the Wikipedia Chemistry Portal that are “of widespread general public interest”. It would be nice to see CAS being even more open about CAS registry numbers, or even (a pipe dream, I fear) to show interest in the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier, InChI....
Clearly some publishers are responding vigorously to market forces, but the steady growth of free information resources is a real threat to them. My colleague and ICIC organiser Harry Collier has coined the expression “global information warming” for the phenomenon of the slow melting of the icebergs that are the business bases of the traditional information companies....
[PS: Here omitting summaries of the NIH, HHMI, and Harvard OA mandates.]
These are just a few of this year’s open access announcements. Hurriedly, publishers have started to offer to deposit articles to PubMed Central on behalf of authors.
Meanwhile the British Library and its collaborators have ambitious plans for online digital archive UK PubMed Central over the next three years. New and improved features will include direct links to the 18 million records currently available on the US version of PubMed, as part of the European Bioinformatics Institute’s CiteXplore bibliographic tool, new ways to extract biological information from research papers using text analysis and data-mining tools, and access to content not included in traditional journal literature, such as clinical guidelines, technical reports and conference proceedings, all with an easy-to-use interface....
On the commercial front (it is worth remembering that open access organisations can be commercial entities) Springer has acquired BioMed Central. Chemistry Central, part of BioMed Central, is about to accept the first submissions for the Journal of Cheminformatics, a new, peer-reviewed, open access journal. The publishers say that they will also strive to respond to emerging electronic technologies to enhance the display of scientific data.
Other web initiatives include ChemSpider, a structure-centric community for chemists. It provides free access to an online database and is also a collaboration tool....
Microsoft is to fund a two-year eChemistry pilot to demonstrate the benefits to chemists of online, open access data. Eight organisations are collaborating in the project, which seeks to merge chemistry and the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Project (OAI-ORE). The aim is to develop standardised, interoperable, and machine-readable mechanisms to express information about compound information objects on the web. OAI-ORE foresees a large number of interoperating repositories rather than monolithic databases, allowing search engines to gather data from a wide range of disparate machine-readable sources. The results of eChemistry will be hosted by PubChem and other repositories....
Comment. I understand the claim that OA threatens TA publishers. But if it's not carefully elaborated, it overlooks the sense in which OA and TA coexist now and might coexist for a long time. I like Warr's point that threatened industries respond with cost-cutting or innovation. But while she discusses some publisher responses to OA, many of her examples are from OA publishers rather than TA publishers. I'd like to hear her elaborate on the threat to TA publishers and evaluate whether their responses are sufficiently innovative.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/05/2008 11:17:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
