The Scholarly Kitchen

Watch this video, and learn how Halloween originated. (Forgive the condescending narrator.)

Very scary!

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This week, the news that the Christian Science Monitor will cease its daily print edition come April 2009 made a relatively big splash in publishing circles, judging by the emails and mainstream media coverage I saw. By changing from daily to weekly, the Christian Science Monitor is the first “national newspaper” to throw in the towel on print, according to the New York Times.

Big news? Forgive me, but it’s not big, and it’s not about print/online really. The Christian Science Monitor isn’t a national newspaper but a sometimes-respectable newspaper published by a church and delivered through the mail to just over 50,000 people (a smaller circulation than the Anchorage Daily News, for example). The hotel drop doesn’t happen, the newsstand isn’t a distribution point, and in the modern era, it’s pretty marginal.

Despite Pulitzer Prizes in the past, I haven’t read a Christian Science Monitor in years, in print or online. From a personal perspective, the coverage of it surprised me in that “he’s still alive?” kind of way, like you feel when someone mentions Dom DeLuise or Shaun Cassidy.

The paper has struggled since the 1980s, with repeated layoffs, and hasn’t contributed revenue in decades. It’s a church-funded news outlet, albeit an occasionally admirable one.

Lastly, the organization supporting it holds to tenets that cause unnecessary suffering and early death by denying children and others proper medical care in the name of religious freedom. I have a hard time sympathizing with the financial travails of a newspaper it owns.

While the cessation of print is the story in the mainstream media, perhaps a more helpful analysis would talk about the commoditization of traditional journalistic content in recent years or the anachronistic nature of the organization supporting the paper.

Maybe those two factors matter more than whether they deliver in paper or online.

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The subscription model is often dismissed as antiquated and irrelevant, with licensing elevated as a better solution — cheaper, more efficient, and more suitable to a networked world, its proponents offer.

Yet, as a colleague once noted to me, the subscription model is peerless. Not only does it allow individuals to pay for things they value, it allows individuals to come and go as they please. It’s granular, in the modern parlance, and often more affordable than a license or pay-as-you-go.

From a publisher’s perspective, the subscription model has many virtues, including a predictable cash flow, manageable conversion and renewal trends, and rational pricing.

While subscriptions may be out of vogue in STM online publishing, they are prevalent in many other aspects of digital life. From cable television to anti-virus software to Netflix to cellular phones to online services to Kindle content, modern humans subscribe, pay monthly, and renew very happily for things they value.

So, what’s different about today’s publishing subscriptions? The finished goods or “toys” tied to them.

In the print era, the print journal was the finished good we produced — high-quality, impossible for the consumer to replicate (ink and paper warehousing, printing equipment, etc.). Tying information to the aesthetics of a precious finished good was at the heart of print subscriptions. It created “lock in,” as well, making the user dependent on the finished good in order to receive the information. The device and the content were inseparable.

In the online era, our information has become divorced from any finished good associated with its publisher. We’re just more online flotsam.

But other subscriptions give you toys. Your cable company gives you a cool cable box, a remote, and a DVR. Your cell phone provider lures you in with a nifty phone. Your anti-virus software goes with your expensive computer. The Kindle is a connected reading device, a finished good allowing even free blogs to charge for their content, just for the convenience of getting on that device. Even Netflix gives you a DVD and a highly designed return envelope, which many subscribers probably can now open, reconfigure, and reuse relying only on muscle memory.

Will the subscription model play a role in the future of STM publishing? It could, if we could make the right toy — something that advances research while also providing a modicum of cool. Creating this new “lock in” with a physical device might be impossible, but others are succeeding using this model for modern subscriptions.

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Google makes about $16 billion in revenues each year. Today, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google announced a settlement allowing certain activities around scanned books found via Google Book Search. The price for Google to settle this? $125 million, or 0.7% of one year’s revenues.

Smart move, and a win-win for everyone involved. Google will continue to dominate search results and easily win back the small amount it paid to publishers for their participation. Authors might get new revenues from their books. And scholars will have better access to more information.

Of course, the issue of more information will bring about new services and approaches for handling discovery, filtering, and customization. And the beat goes on.

October 30 UPDATE: Harvard says “No, thanks” to the settlement.

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In 2005, Dick Hardt gave his famous “Identity 2.0″ presentation at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON). The logic and examples were compelling and complete, the analogy to real-life convincing. There was really not much more to say on the topic. If you saw the presentation, you were convinced — the time had come for an open, portable online identity.

Since then, OpenID has been gaining traction in new media spaces, particularly blogs and social media sites.

Now, according to the New York Times, Microsoft has made Windows Live compatible with OpenID, recognizing it as “the de facto standard Web protocol for authentication.”

This move virtually ensures that major players from Yahoo! to Google to AOL will have to stop paying lip service to OpenID and begin to accept it as the authentication modality of the Web.

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In 2004, a number of commercial publishers were brought before the UK House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee to explain and defend their business models.

Crispin Davis, the CEO of Reed Elsevier (now Sir Crispin Davis, having joined the British knighthood along with Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John), was asked very directly about how his company could substantiate large and systematic increases in the subscription prices of their journals over time. It was a very unambiguous question, to which he replied:

The biggest single factor is usage. That is what librarians look at more than anything else and it is what they determine whether they renew, do not renew and so on. We have usage going up by an average of 75 per cent each year. In other words, the cost per article download is coming down by around 70 per cent each year. That is fantastic value for money in terms of the institution.

Avoiding the question, what Sir Crispin is really saying is that the real metric here is not cost but cost per download, and given enough downloads, any subscription price (even Brain Research) could be substantiated.

On the surface, a normative price model makes sense.  We purchase cheese by the pound (or kilogram), apples by the peck, wine is sold by the bottle, and gold is sold by the ounce.  But information functions very differently than other physical goods.  Producing journal articles incurs high fixed costs and very low marginal costs.  The cost of sending another PDF over the Internet costs the publisher virtually nothing, which is why Elsevier wants to send you more.  Lots more.

Elsevier has recently unveiled a new feature on its Science Direct platform called their Document Download Manager which allows a reader to download multiple articles simultaneously.  If you don’t pre-select any articles, they’ll just send you the first 20.

By why stop at 20?  As computer storage space gets bigger and cheaper and bandwidth grows, there is no reason why they couldn’t send you entire collections.  I could just imagine their press-release: “Don’t waste a second of your precious time waiting for a download!  We’ve just dumped our entire journal contents on your machine!”  One could then sign up for an RSS-like feed that would automatically update one’s computer with new issues when they become available.

Measuring and comparing the unit cost of a download starts becoming very meaningless in an environment where bulk downloading is not only facilitated, but highly encouraged. In addition, the interface of a publisher can result in different usage patterns, making comparison of journal usage across publishers — the explicit goal of Project COUNTER — very difficult to do.

While there are many reasons to consider usage based metrics, the development of a Usage Factor — a project undertaken by the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) — has unintentional consequences.  By focusing on usage metrics, they reify the article download.  Article downloads cease to be a measure of readership and become a goal in-and-of-themselves, as publishers becomes transfixed on maximizing the number of documents they send out into the ether.  Not only does this create a new type of spam (a Tragedy of the Commons on the Internet), it obfuscates any meaning one derives from usage reports, making it impossible to distinguish the intention of a single human click from bulk machine downloading.

One could argue that what the UKSG is doing is no different than what the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) did to the citation in creating the Impact Factor.  But there is a difference.  Citations are public, transparent, and can be validated.  If I suspect that a journal is artificially inflating its numbers, I can go back to the articles and start counting myself.

The UKSG is relying on the honesty of the publisher to send usage reports that reflect true download counts.  While I don’t question the honesty of most publishers, I do question some, and there is no way for a skeptic to validate the numbers.  Even if a publisher were willing to send raw transaction logs upon request, few have the resources or ability to digest the data.  It is a system built on Blind Faith, trust me.

When rewards are high and risk is low, any opaque system is open to gaming and abuse.  Usage Factor will be no different.

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If they had invented this for pay phones in the 1990s, I might not be married today.

I’m talking about Google’s new Mail Goggles, an optional service in Gmail that seeks to eliminate drunken late-night weekend emails.

Users who sign up for the service have to complete a set of 5 simple math problems in 60 seconds before they can send an email on weekends between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.

According to the New York Times, Mail Goggles was created by a Google engineer with real-world experience in the matters at hand:

A Gmail engineer named Jon Perlow wrote the program after sending his share of regrettable late-night missives, including a plea to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend, he wrote on the company’s Gmail blog.

Does this mean there will soon be services to prevent drunken texting and Twittering?

It seems technologists view technology as the solution to everything! I mean, really, why not just, a) get over it, or b) stop drinking?

As you may have inferred from the brief vignette above, I’m glad I called my then-girlfriend and confessed my feelings that night. We’ve been happily married for 17+ years.

If only they could limit this service to surly drunks . . .

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Facebook was once touted as a major new driver of Web 2.0 applications after it opened up Facebook Platform in 2007. Facebook Platform allowed application developers to create Facebook applications that reached millions of users on a powerful social media infrastructure. The results were astounding, with applications gaining tens of thousands of users almost overnight.

Recently, Facebook redesigned, driving its applications underground. Exactly why this happened is explicated nicely in a blog posting and accompanying video presentation at the allFacebook blog. Surprisingly, even close collaborators were caught off-guard, the implications of Facebook’s redesign only being noticed when usage of applications dropped like a stone.

Why would Facebook do this?

To grow even more.

As Scott Rafer from Lookery states in the video, Facebook is shameless about growth. Adding applications drove people to Facebook in large numbers, and helped Facebook inflect its growth upward significantly. Now, to grow more, Facebook needs a new approach, and applications get in the way.

What is this new approach? Facebook Connect.

By making API‘s available, Facebook enters the general Web more aggressively, and will extend its platform into more realms, get more users, and have more sites developing Facebook integrations than ever before.

According to Rafer, Facebook is willing to leave some casualties behind in its pursuit of growth.

This explains why our Facebook applications at NEJM have been slow to be adopted. We launched them just as Facebook changed, and until very recently, nobody knew what their strategy was. Now, it appears clear — Facebook wants our traffic, and they will lure us to build bridges for them into our audiences.

Given the trends online, we may have no choice but to go along.

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The fact that information is no longer scarce should surprise nobody. A very salient comment in the Scholarly Kitchen recently put this into a brand perspective. But this flood of information is threatening to drown people

The audience is becoming defiant.

I wrote recently about how students as Michigan State University have hidden themselves from public email view, relying instead on the sheltered zones of Facebook and Twitter for communication with smaller, known groups of associates they have control over. Now, an essay in Wired considers trends in blogging, once a wide-open form of personal communication, and how the tsunami of information is causing bloggers to flee to higher ground.

Not only are readers hiding from the storm, but authors are seeking shelter, as well.

One blogger has retired from the medium owing to its lack of intimacy now that blogs are so mainstream. Other complaints are that professional blogs are drowning out personal blogs, and that writers craving connection with an audience are finding the actual audience too large, heterogeneous, and unwieldy.

Where are they going?

To email lists, to Facebook, and to other niche community sites that allow blogging but also limit the experience to a defined, selected audience.

Talent wants a spotlight. In the general blogosphere, it’s like the house lights are always coming up, and the star bloggers are beginning to seek more intimate venues, a soft blue spot and an audience that still gives them a buzz.

Twitter is a real beneficiary of this trend, with the brevity of the form, instantaneous feedback, and messaging tools contributing to its popularity (the new iPhone hasn’t hurt, either).

As Paul Boutin, the author of the Wired piece, puts it:

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. You’ll find Scoble, Calacanis, and most of their buddies from the golden age there. They claim it’s because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them. As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity.

As owners of niche communities, STM publishers would seem to have an advantage. What might we do with it?

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Two recent posts caught my eye, both touching on the same topic generally — the continued and rapid reinvention of the news business.

Robert Scoble is urging newspapers to iterate fast, and to behave like a technology industry. He makes a compelling argument, basically that users are moving faster than newspapers, and a gap is opening. Only by pushing forward with many quick experiments can news organizations hope to catch or keep up. To do this, news has to have more urgency and be sourced differently.

Scott Karp notes how the link economy is about to be forever changed as major players like the New York Times and Washington Post enter it with their brands, editorial heft, and traffic. One of the most shocking changes this might portend is the end to reliance on the Associated Press. Tribune Co. has already signaled its intent to drop the AP. Others are sure to follow, as people realize news can be linked to instead of purchased.

The Internet is breaking news — into different forms, new segments, and changing configurations.

Once broken, how will it be reassembled? Scholarly publishers should take note. Our readers want broad, synthesized coverage of a vast array of information, yet we’re in the habit of providing them with silos defined as journals. Why do that in the networked world? Editorial hubris, brand integrity, and tradition are often cited, but a truly user-centric approach would drive publishers to find answers that elude them otherwise.

And that will be refreshing news, indeed.