Cameron Neylon

In a week or so's time I have been invited to speak as part of a forward
planning exercise at
[Elsevier](http://elsevier.com/wps/find/homepage.cws_home). To some this
may seem like an opportunity to go in for an all guns blazing OA rant or
perhaps to plant some incendiary device but I see it more as opportunity
to nudge, perhaps cajole, a big player in the area of scholarly
publishing in the right direction. After all if we are right about the
efficiency gains for authors and readers that will be created by Open
Access publication and we are right about the way that web based systems
utterly changes the rules of scholarly communication then even an
organization of the size of Elsevier has to adapt or wither away.
Persuading them to move in right direction because it is in their own
interests would be an effective way of speeding up the process of
positive change.

My plan is to focus less on the arguments for making more research
output Open Access and more on what happens as a greater proportion of
those outputs become freely available, something that I see as
increasingly inevitable. Where that proportion may finally be is
anyone's guess but it is going to be a much bigger proportion than it is
now. What will authors and funders want and need from their publication
infrastructure and what are the business opportunities that arise from
those. For me these fall into four main themes:

- Tracking via aggregation. Funders and institutions want more and more
  to track the outputs of their research investment. Providing tools and
  functionality that will enable them to automatically aggregate and
  slice and dice these outputs is a big business opportunity. The data
  themselves will be free but providing it in the form that people need
  it rapidly and effectively will add value that they will be prepared
  to pay for.
- Speed to publish as a market differentiator. Authors will want their
  content out and available and being acted on fast. Speed to
  publication is potentially the biggest remaining area for competition
  between journals. This is important because there will almost
  certainly be less journals with greater "quality" or "brand"
  differentiation. There is a plausible future in which there are only
  two journals, [Nature](http://nature.com/nature) and [PLoS
  ONE](http://www.plosone.org/home.action).
- Data publication, serving, and archival. There may be less journals
  but there will be much greater diversity of materials being published
  through a larger number of mechanisms. There are massive opportunities
  in providing high quality infrastructure and services to funders and
  institutions to aggregate, publish, and archive the full set of
  research outputs. I intend to draw heavily on [Dorothea
  Salo](http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/)'s wonderful [slideset on data
  publication](http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/save-the-cows-data-curation-for-the-rest-of-us-1533252)
  for this part.
- Social search. Literature searching is the main area where there are
  plausible efficiency gains to be made in the current scholarly
  publications cycle. According to the [Research Information
  Network](http://www.rin.ac.uk)'s [model of
  costs](http://www.rin.ac.uk/rin-model/) search accounts for a very
  significant proportion of the non-research costs ofÂ  publishing.
  Building the personal networks ([Bill Hooker](http://sennoma.net)'s,
  [Distributed Wetware Online Information
  Filter](http://friendfeed.com/coturnix/e067f385/arvindsays-day-i-joined-friendfeed-was-last)
  \[down in the comments\] or DWOIF) that make this feasible may well be
  *the* new research skill of the 21st century. Tools that make this
  work effectively are going to be very popular. What will they look
  like?

But what have I missed? What (constructive!) ideas and thoughts would
you want to place in the minds of the people thinking about where to
take one of the world's largest scholarly publication companies and its
online information and collaboration infrastructure.?

*Full disclosure: Part of the reason for writing this post is to
disclose publicly that I am doing this gig. Elsevier are covering my
travel and accommodation costs but are not paying any fee.*


In a week or so’s time I have been invited to speak as part of a forward planning exercise at Elsevier. To some this may seem like an opportunity to go in for an all guns blazing OA rant or perhaps to plant some incendiary device but I see it more as opportunity to nudge, perhaps cajole, a big player in the area of scholarly publishing in the right direction.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

What would you say to Elsevier?