Today’s post features an interview of Elsevier’s chairman Youngsuk (“YS”) Chi, conducted by ITHAKA president Kevin Guthrie during the opening session of ITHAKA’s Next Wave conference. It features discussion and perspective not only about Elsevier itself and its strategic direction, but also about broader changes in scholarly communication and approaches to organizational leadership.
As publishers increasingly lose control of the final stage of the publishing process, they are looking elsewhere to extract economic value. They are finding it upstream, in the various linked processes that lead to the (erstwhile) final document.
Last week’s STM news raises questions about whether scholarly publishers are prepared to radically improve content distribution. Is content syndication the end game?
Will Read and Publish models transform the scholarly journal publishing business? And if they do, will it be good for the academy?
We can be certain that, if Elsevier asserts its obvious platform advantages, there is no data firewall that can protect other publishers from Elsevier’s strategic advance.
Elsevier’s acquisition of Aries Systems sends shockwaves through the industry, but is it really that surprising?
The last morning of this year’s Fiesole Library Collection Retreat focused on the important topic of collaboration to improve scholarship. Read more in today’s post from Alice Meadows.
Libraries and legacy publishers are in an unholy embrace. They need not love each other to feel they should stick together.
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they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated.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?
Society publishers resist the sale of their publications to bidders from the commercial world because they view the publications as a central component of the society itself.
Today, Clarivate is announcing that it recently acquired Kopernio, a startup launched last year to streamline access to scholarly content.
Research publishers may acquire textbook publishers in order to increase market share in libraries with inclusive access programs
There are various ways that customers get locked in to services in scholarly communications. These methods are longed for by publishers and disliked by customers, but they naturally emerge as a part of the economy.
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?