Transcript The State of the A&I Market – The publisher’s perspective? Mark Furneaux Business Development Director, Wize Nordic AB [email protected] 13 November 2009

The State of the A&I Market –
The publisher’s perspective?
Mark Furneaux
Business Development Director, Wize Nordic AB
[email protected]
13 November 2009
Outline
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Types of A&I
Value of value added
Is anything dying?
What does the future hold
What else is changing?
Conclusion
Types of A&I
• Scenarios
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a) Index header records from e-journals
b) As a) but include non-electronic and/or non-serial content
c) Index electronic and hardcopy content using editorial skills to
include hard to process content
d) As c) but include foreign language content without English
summaries
e) As c) but include hard to find material, local grey literature, with
local input centres
f) Index at a deeper level within a paper (e.g tables and figures),
make objects interactive
Battle lines are drawn between some A&I producers
Value of value added
• Print and CDROM A&I products are not dead
• Heavy investment in value added by A&I publishers
a)
Value added for librarian – Scopus analytical tools, helps those who
‘buy’ the products
b) Value added for end-user – author profiles, citation searching,
Derwent patent families, advanced search options, social tagging to
allow comments, ratings etc
c) New products as alternate revenue sources – RefWorks, CSA
Illustrata, Summon
Is anything dying?
• High price, easy to process, low added value products should die –
Google Scholar will do.
• Low price, easy to process, low added value may have a role (eg BL
Inside, J-Gate)
• High price, high value added ‘comprehensive’ databases
- Scopus and Web of Knowledge – big brands, end-user penetration,
high value added, high price tag
Is there room for Scopus and WoK?
• Specialised sources – niche A&I publishers, often non-commercial or
side-line, close to their market, high value, high A&I content, no
economies of scale – bought up or consumed
• Content changing – A&I producers change what they include because of
free web (eg TWI patents)
• Key measure of A&I success is usage, ProQuest reports exponential
increase in usage driven by value added extras and alerts
What does the future hold?
• A&I innovation has been disappointing – most databases like hardcopy.
Innovation in delivery, value added services, A&I record mainly cost
reduction
• Biggest weakness of A&I and full-text – more and more content
retrieved, less and less time to read
• On the fly review creation from A&I search results and full-text articles
• On the fly translation of non-English content into English and of English
search results and full-text into non-English. Searching in non-English
• Searching often pretty simple still
• Summon – will indexed combination of library catalogue, institutional
repositories, free web, plus a few paid for sources be good enough
(95%?) to replace need for Scopus, WoK,
METADEX etc?
• Is a single interface needed?
What else is changing
• Publishing specialisations are becoming blurred
Publishers have own platforms, aggregators publish, agents aggregate,
primary publishers produce A&I, A&I publishers aggregates disintermediation
• Blurring of division between A&I, full-text and e-books – indexed
summary still one of most effective ways to retrieve full-text accurately
• Some products combine A&I and full-text – CABI has abstracts database
with hard to find full-text
• ProQuest acquisition of Dialog – impact of a common platform
• A&I services trying to become one stop shop, almost a federated search
(Thomson adds CABI, PsycINFO to WoS), also Elsevier, EBSCO, ProQuest
etc
• Horses for courses - complex searches (eg patents) need specialist
sources, native interfaces with advanced search features, depth of
coverage, simple searches (often by undergraduates) need easy to use
tools, common interface, less than comprehensive results.
Research based universities have greater need of A&I.
What else is changing (cont)
• Corporate need for A&I may differ from academic – ROI, time,
comprehensiveness, specialist use specialist tools
• Searchers want answers, don’t care where they came from or
who paid for them
• Many A&I databases now indexed in Google Scholar and can be
accessed from subscribing institutions via that route – drives
usage
• Most searching is Google-like
• Platforms becoming portable, customisable widgets allow access
from departmental web pages, course pages etc
• Any search of a library resource is better than Google.
• Quality and authority less important – will Wikipedia do?
• Increasingly hard to get new sales of A&I products
• Third World needs may be different
Use of A&I
Conclusion
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Evolution and change
Some species of A&I will die out
A few innovations (mutations) will flourish and dominate
A more crowded information universe demands better tools
to prosper
• Need to see innovative A&I products, not just value added
enhancements of same old products