5: Business Models

Derive new business models for science publishers and libraries

Other Information:

Traditional business models of publishing are being threatened -- Academic publishers have been slower to encounter, but are not immune from, the disruption that the internet has wrought on other content industries[The Economist, 2009]. The academic publishers' major customers, academic libraries, are facing massive budget cuts [Kniffel and Bailey, 2009], and so are unlikely to be a major source of continued revenue. The internet has greatly reduced the costs of publishing, new players (such Google and other software companies) have appeared in the market, and legislative and funding bodies are actively addressing issues of free access to data and text [Hargreaves, 2011]. The advent of the internet has greatly reduced the monetary value that can be extracted from paper-based academic content, and science publishers, who have traditionally depended on extracting this value, face a crisis, since their old business models are suffering disruption. Conversely, the internet permits the creation of new added-value services relating to search, semantics and integration that present exciting new commercial opportunities. Clearly the scholarly publishing industry needs to engage in discussions with different partners within the value chain, if it is to be included in the development of the new standards, services, business models, metrics/analysis, legislation, knowledge ecosystems and evaluation frameworks that the internet now makes possible, rather than being supplanted by new agile startups that have the ability to adapt more swiftly. The software developers who build the current research informatics infrastructure are also very aware of the shortfalls and hindrances generated by today's fragmented development efforts. The problems here can be attributed to a number of elements. First, heterogeneous technologies and designs, and the lack (or sometimes the superfluity!) of standards, cause unnecessary technical difficulties and directly affect integration costs. Second, a complex landscape of intellectual property rights and licensing for software add legal concerns to developers' requirements. Third, research software developers typically work in a competitive environment, either academic or commercial, where innovation is rewarded much more highly than evolutionary and collaborative software reuse. This is especially true in a funding environment driven by the need for intensive innovation, where reusing other peoples' code is a likely source of criticism. Finally, even under optimal technical conditions, it is still challenging for software programmers to understand what components are the most appropriate for a given challenge, to make contact with the correct people to facilitate the construction of tools, and to work within distributed teams across groups to build high-quality interoperable software. The impact of these tools is, far too often, solely based on how immediately useful they will be to researchers themselves, with no thought for the wider community. Thus changing roles and business models form an immense challenge for libraries, publishers and software developers. The only fruitful way forward, we firmly believe, will be for all parties collaborating to build new tools that optimally support scholarship in a distributed open environment. Only by creating a demonstrably better research environment will we convince the entire system of scholarly communication and merit assessment to adopt new forms and models.

Stakeholder(s):

• Science Publishers


• Libraries

Objective(s):

5.1: Value

Content