Roger Schonfeld is Director, Library and Scholarly Communication Program, for Ithaka S+R. In this role, he leads studies of academics’ and students’ attitudes, practices, and needs, as well as research on the changing role of the academic library, learned society, and scholarly publisher. In recent years, Roger has spearheaded the development of Ithaka S+R’s local survey service, helping individual colleges and universities to examine and more effectively serve the practices and needs of students and faculty members. He also consults on strategic and business planning for libraries and library consortia, digital humanities projects, distinctive collections and centers of excellence, and scholarly publishers. Roger has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative. Earlier, he was a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where he worked on projects related to college athletics and scholarly communication. Roger has a degree in English Literature from Yale University. His Ithaka S+R projects and publications are freely available online, and he is active on Twitter as @rschon. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also operates Artstor, JSTOR, and Portico, but the views shared here are solely Roger’s.
The European academic sector has taken a stronger consortial negotiating posture, resulting in Big Deal cancellations. Today, equity investors and analysts want to know: Will this contagion spread from Europe to North America, resulting in global pandemic?
In Springer Nature’s “botched” IPO, did the market see it as one of the publishers at risk of being left behind by real innovation in scholarly communication and research workflow?
Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated. Researchers need a supercontinent. Will it be Elsevier, Digital Science, Clarivate, ResearchGate, or someone else? And what does this mean for other publishers?
Today, Clarivate is announcing that it recently acquired Kopernio, a startup launched last year to streamline access to scholarly content.
Publishers are understandably concerned about piracy, but the STM/NISO initiative RA21 “to align and simplify pathways to subscribed content across participating scientific platforms” has scoped its problem the wrong way. Simply put: It’s not about security. It’s about identity. Every individual should be in control of their own identity. Can RA21 realize its potential to serve the broader interests of scientists and academia, not just the understandable objectives of publishers and vendors?
Breaking news today: Digital Science is launching a new citation index that includes a research analytics suite a modern article discovery and access experience. This new product, Dimensions, will offer stiff new competition for Elsevier and Clarivate.
Research workflow providers can be expected to lock in researchers and universities to their products through a variety of tactics. This piece provides an overview of what is meant by lock-in and a taxonomy of approaches that may be pursued.
As workflow providers build deep relationships with scientists early in the research lifecycle, how can publishers establish and maintain strong author relationships? This piece proposes a number of fundamental strategic options.
An emerging duopoly for the new class of scientific research workflow products could marginalize publishers large and small to the benefit of the Big Two. This first of two pieces provides the strategic context, while tomorrow we will review options for those publishers at risk of being left behind.
Scientific workflow providers Elsevier, Digital Science, and COS differ in their strategy. To what extent will they provide end-to-end integrated workflows?