BPN 1595 Elsevier bows for scientists

Elsevier has retracted its support for the Research Works Act, the US legal proposal which was to impede access to scientific publications. The publishing company does so after protests of almost 8000 scientists. They signed a petition on internet indicating that they would not cooperate with lsevier any longer in providing articles, editing and peer reviewing as long as Elsevier would support the Act and reduce the subscriptions. The massive boycott of the largest publisher of academic journals in the world was launched by a Cambridge, MA mathematician in a blog post and followed by several other blogs like Buziaulane.

Elsevier says in a statement on its site: “Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders,”

Cameron Neylon analyses the retreat of Elsevier’s support for the RWA and sees this move as an important advantage for the Open Access movement. He concludes:
1. The bill is dead;
2. This is a backdown, not a change of heart;
3. Shifting from a negative campaign against something towards something positive will be hard.

BPN 1182 Looking forward to a new (Reed) Elsevier

On Monday I wrote a posting on Reed Elsevier and I mentioned its forthcoming sale of Reed Elsevier Business division. This would make the slimmed down Reed Elsevier (or will it just be Elsevier again) a one-segment publishing company: scientific, technical and especially medical information (STM). Thinking about it I saw some similarities between the company histories of those two companies, which started out from The Netherlands and started there internationalisation and specialisation strategies in the eighties.

In the eighties The Dutch publishing company VNU started its internationalisation program. It bought publishing companies in Europe and the US and grew and grew. It sold its printing plants, followed by the sale of the newspapers and later on the book division, than bought and five years later sold its fast money maker, the directory division. In the meantime the strategy was to become a digital data company with more than 50 percent of revenues from databases. It started to specialise in marketing data company as those companies are less dependent on advertising revenues. And it collected a host of those companies with Nielsen as a pearl in the crown. From that point onwards it was no longer a publisher, but rather a data intelligence company. When the board wanted to buy the Kohi Noor diamond in the crown, IMS the shareholders, specifically venture capitalist started to revolt. In the end the board had to give up the acquisition and carve up the company into Nielsen and VNU Media (which sold most of its subsidiaries outside The Netherlands; it aims to become an digital publisher and is well on its way to become one).

For the former Elsevier the change into an STM company is the fourth step of the company to become a one-segment publisher. Elsevier began as a conglomerate of print plants and consumer, business and scientific publishers and over the years it sold off the division by division. The print plants were the first to go in the eighties. After that the newspapers in the consumer section had to go, followed by the consumer book publishers. The business division which got a big impulse when Elsevier merged with Reed, is now up for sale. So by the end of the year Reed Elsevier will be solely a STM publisher and might be re-named Elsevier or Elsevier Science again. Elsevier will be a full fledged science publisher with mighty databases like Science Direct. Of course the new company will be faced with all kind of new initiatives in the academic publishing world: open access and the public library of science.

The history of the two companies which were both Dutch by origin contains many similarities. They followed the same internationalisation policy and had the same strategy towards revenues from digital publishing (except Reed Elsevier and especially the scientific division was more aggressive than VNU). Now the new Reed Elsevier (or the future Elsevier or Elsevier Science) has also the intention to become a one-segment company, be it not an data intelligence company. Projecting into the future for the new Reed Elsevier (or the future Elsevier or Elsevier Science), the question can be posed, what the strategy will be of the new Reed Elsevier. Is the scientific publisher moving towards a break-up like VNU or will the company find fresh grounds in its one segment of publishing? Or will it also move out of publishing and more in the direction of running research organisations or other directions?

I wonder what the Elsevier Science people think about the new direction. Comments are welcome.

Blog Posting Number: 1182

Tags: scientific publishing, academic publishing, STM

My museum of content related artefacts (15)

1987: External CD-ROM player

The external CD-ROM player on the photograph was my first private CD-ROM player, a Sanyo PD1, Portable CD-ROM drive (serial number 13711231). At that time I was working for a software company, which had electronic publishing as a mission. Publishing CD-ROMs was part of the mission. But preaching is not enough to convince potential clients. So a PC plus a CD-ROM player was needed and those PCs were not in abundance on the market. There was no consumer market yet as CD-ROM was still a carrier of text rather than multimedia. If you needed a CD-ROM player in the early years you needed external top loaders, which were not exactly portable. So the next generation external CD-ROM players had portables, which could be linked to the PC with a 16 pins cable and software. By 1988 the first built-in CD-Rom players came on the market, produced by unknown companies. The company I was working for bought a BEST machine, which looked like a sewing machine with a blue screen. It worked well and it was transportable (something like 8 kilo in weight); but for demonstration purposes it was sufficient.

But the hardware was not the only worry from the start of CD-ROM. There was a problem with the software. From the beginning of CD-ROM in 1985 there was a problem with the software format. Every brand had its own format, which presented a problem to publishers. They would have to format their products according to brands. This would present an extra cost factor. As the problem was soon recognised by the industry, action was initiated. Computer companies (Apple), publishers (Elsevier Science with Philip Lord), software companies (Microsoft) and electronics manufacturers (Philips) started to talk to each other and decided to establish an industry standard to overcome this standard. And soon there was the High Sierra standard, named after the conference hotel High Sierra at Lake Tahu (USA). This industry standard became an official standard, ISO 9660. This standard gave an impulse to the CD-ROM text publishing industry.

In the first five years of CD-ROM the market was a professional information market and the products were mainly text oriented products such a reference works and databases. With the advent of internet between 1991 and 1993, the debate came to the point that publishers were asking themselves whether the future would be off-line with CD-ROM or online. A publisher like Elsevier SCience had invested heavily in CD-ROMs as the products were close to the books they used to publish.

It was only by 1989 that the consumer market was addressed, partly with text products and multimedia products. Problem was the lack of an industry standard of multimedia. By 1991 the MPC standard came about and the CD-ROM market bursted open. PCs were sold with built-in CD-ROM players and a bundle of CD-ROMs. Philips, still a computer manufacturer at that time, was ahead of the trend and started in 1989 the Headstart PC series with built-in CD-ROM player and a bundle/bookshelf of CD-ROMs. In Europe the bundle of CD-ROMs, under the name CompLex, was produced by AND in Rotterdam; one of these CD-ROMs contained a European road database.

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Blog Posting Number: 826

Tags: digital heritage