Analyzing Science Publishing Costs
October 30, 2013
The science journal Nature examines the changing state of academic journals in, “Open Access: The True Cost of Science Publishing.” Writer Richard Van Noorden goes in-depth on the costs behind publishing research articles, the factors behind those costs, and how open access publishing may turn the whole field on its ear (and whether this is a good thing). Let’s start with some crazy-sounding numbers; the article tells us:
“Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000. Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry, so the average cost to the publisher of producing an article is likely to be around $3,500–4,000.”
That sure seems like a lot. Traditional publishers say that fans of open access understate the value they add to each article while overstating how much they make on them. It is difficult, though, to examine these claims, since these journals play their financial cards close to the vest. Such secrecy may eventually give way before the wealth of information available about open access options, which Noorden covers thoroughly. More and more researchers will hesitate to take the big names at their word on costs.
It is worth noting one downside to the current proliferation of open access journals: quality control. The traditional journals maintain that their high publishing fees are partially justified by the effort they put into sorting and disqualifying submissions. Both those publishers and open access journals ensure quality through the peer-review process, but recent findings bring doubt to the reliability of this measure at certain, newer publishers. Though the transition to open access journals may appear inevitable to some, the old-school players seem determined to defend their model. Will they succeed?
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
After Experian, Will Other Publishers Be Next?
October 26, 2013
I read “Senator Intensifies Probe of Data Brokers.” It seems that the leaders in Washington, DC have discovered data aggregation. Let me think. Right. Data aggregation has been around for more than a half century. I remember Ian Sharp (anyone remember him?) telling me about his discovery of data aggregation when he was a lad and before he created his business in the 1970s.
The point of the write up I noted was:
“However, if these recent news accounts are accurate, they raise serious questions about whether Experian as a company has appropriate practices in place for vetting its customers and sharing sensitive consumer data with them, regardless of the particular line of business.” Mr. Rockefeller’s letter is part of a larger effort by the Commerce Committee to understand how companies collect, share and sell intimate details about the shopping habits, health concerns, family circumstances and financial status of consumers at a time when Americans are increasingly sharing personal information online.
I have not comment about Experian or any similar firm.
My reaction is that if the leaders in DC are willing to name a particular company, that’s interesting. More intriguing is the question, “Will the various committees start taking a closer look at outfits like Thomson Reuters, McGraw Hill, and (hold your breath), the New York Times?
There are many ways to deliver a solution to the problem of certain organizations disseminating information.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2013
Tablets and Periodicals
October 19, 2013
Are tablets the salvation of the newspaper industry? Google’s chief economist thinks they may be. In a speech he recently gave in Milan, Hal Varian points to the ways consumers’ usage of tablets differs from that of other devices. Writer Will Conley summarizes:
“Varian said tablets are the most newspaper-like electronic medium due to their status as ‘leisure time’ reading devices. Citing a Pew Foundation study, Varian pointed out that tablets are the preferred electronic news reading medium for mornings and evenings—during which readers spend the most time absorbing the news—beating out both desktop and smartphones for those periods. Ad revenue depends on the amount of time spent reading the news, he said, and therefore the proliferation of tablets will help the online newspaper industry to gain a new foothold for the first time in 40 years.”
Varian believes tablets might even prompt users to devote more time to reading news, restoring the “analytic depth” that has been eroding along with our attention spans. It’s a nice vision. Unfortunately, an article at Gigaom that came out on the same day as Conley’s piece takes a contradictory stance. Gigaom contributor Jon Lund explains “Why Tablet Magazines are a Failure.” (I think we can extrapolate his points to periodicals in general.)
Lund points out that, as of yet, magazine apps haven’t been selling as hoped. Website traffic still far outpaces app usage for the same publications. Lund believes there are several reasons for this, including the ever growing sea of apps in which magazines get swallowed. Then there is the closed nature of these apps. Their content can’t be easily “shared” with a wider social network, and readers have grown accustomed to sharing information with the click of a link. Curation apps like Flipboard and Zite are likewise blocked from reaching in and grabbing content from magazine apps. Finally, he asserts, reading a magazine on a tablet just doesn’t feel right. He laments:
“When I nevertheless manage to find the time to open up an iPad magazine, I feel as if I’m holding an outdated media product in my hands. That’s ironic because these apps tend to be visually appealing, with interactive graphics, embedded videos and well-crafted navigation tools. But the gorgeous layout that works so well in print gets monolithic, almost scary, in its perfectionism on the iPad, and I find myself longing for the web. It’s messy but far more open, more accessible and more adaptable to me, my devices and needs.”
Almost scary? I’m not sure Lund’s discomfort with periodicals in tablet form is widespread and, even if it is, that will probably recede as we move farther from print media. I don’t think his other points are insurmountable, but they are something to consider for Varian and others wishing to pursue a news-coverage renaissance through tablets.
Cynthia Murrell, October 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Academic Publishers Pay Lip Service to Peer Review Standards
October 18, 2013
Science magazine has published an important article about today’s open-access academic journals— Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” I highly recommend reading the entire piece, but I’ll share some highlights here. Journalist John Bohannon begins:
“On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.
“In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper.”
You see, Science performed an elaborate sting operation across the rapidly growing field of open-access journal publication. Most of these journals make money by charging authors upon acceptance of their articles; Bohannon began to suspect a number of these publications were motivated to accept papers that would not stand up to rigorous peer review, despite assertions on their websites to the contrary. What he found is truly disheartening.
See the article for the methodology behind the fake paper and Bohannon’s submissions procedure, both of which are informative in themselves. The results are disheartening. When the article went to press, far more journals (157) had accepted the bogus paper than rejected it (98). Even respected publishers like Elsevier and Sage were found to host at least one of these questionable journals. Most of the publishers that performed any review at all focused on mechanical issues like formatting, not substance. What is going on here? Bohannon offers:
“A striking picture emerges from the global distribution of open-access publishers, editors, and bank accounts. Most of the publishing operations cloak their true geographic location. They create journals with names like the American Journal of Medical and Dental Sciences or the European Journal of Chemistry to imitate—and in some cases, literally clone—those of Western academic publishers. But the locations revealed by IP addresses and bank invoices are continents away: Those two journals are published from Pakistan and Turkey, respectively, and both accepted the paper…
“About one-third of the journals targeted in this sting are based in India—overtly or as revealed by the location of editors and bank accounts—making it the world’s largest base for open-access publishing; and among the India-based journals in my sample, 64 accepted the fatally flawed papers and only 15 rejected it.”
So, opportunists in the developing world have seized upon faux-reviewed academic publishing as the way to turn a PC and an Internet connection into profits. Good for them, bad for science. How does one know when Bing or Google links to fake info? Does it matter anymore? I have to think it does. I hope that people in the field, like Bohannon, who care about open access to legitimate research will find a way to counter this flood of bad information. In the meantime, well… don’t believe every link you read.
Cynthia Murrell, October 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Content Spoofing: A Question of Relevance
October 16, 2013
I heard an AAAS podcast about fake academic papers in open access publications. I did not catch much information from the 20 second sound bite. I navigated to Google and keyed this query:
aaas open access journals
The hit I sought was number eight on the search results page. What is interesting is that the current “hot” item ranked below older information. In one case, the hit was irrelevant to my intent filtered by Google’s behind-the-scenes personalization methods; for example, www.sciencemag.org. Another hit pointed to a couple of outdated studies dating in one case from 2005.
And Bing? Same query. No relevant hit on the first page of the Bing results list. What about that Bing off stuff? Maybe baloney?
And Yandex? Same query. No relevant hits on the first page of results.
And DuckDuckGo, the metasearch engine causing some to swoon? No relevant hit.
Thoughts:
- Timeliness is not a priority in the free Web indexing systems
- Access to rich media containing relevant information for a user’s query is NOT indexed. For all practical purposes, the podcasts are invisible without prior knowledge
- Junk results are not filtered by any of the systems.
No big deal for me. Just another example of how the simplest query can return some darned interesting results.
By the way, the Google results page include two ads, both from “traditional publishers.” One of the advertisers publishes commercial databases. My recollection is that some of the content in these information services could be viewed as incorrect. In fact, one of the Google advertisers accepted the bogus paper.
What’s my point?
The task of finding relevant, on point information is getting more difficult, not easier. Furthermore, as folks shift to “hectic” modes of work, the idea that most people will double check information before accepting it as gospel may be outmoded.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2013
Reed Elsevier CFO Departs for Personal Reasons
September 30, 2013
Short honk. I stopped by the LexisNexis booth at the recent intelligence and police conference. I gave two lectures but apparently my topics did not have enough magnetism to “pull” LexisNexis attendees. I rectified the situation by stopping at the LexisNexis booth. I spoke with two LexisNexis professionals. I cut right to the chase. I asked:
How is LexisNexis revenue tracking to the Reed Elsevier plan?
Not surprisingly, the LexisNexis professionals were not able or willing to answer my question. The reason I asked is that I had heard that like a number of other high profile electronic publishing outfits, generating top line revenue growth was getting more and more difficult. Furthermore, delivering a profit to stakeholders and those who “share” in the organization’s profits was requiring quite a bit of ingenuity. I use the word “ingenuity” to refer to McKinsey and Booz Allen-type of cost control.
In my experience, once the easy costs have been trimmed, costs have an odd way of continuing to go up.
After my booth conversation, I saw the news story “Reed Elsevier CFO Resigns.” I assume that the information is correct, but even the rumor of a high level resignation catches my attention. The story reported:
Reed Elsevier PLC said Wednesday its Chief Financial Officer Duncan Palmer has resigned just over a year into the role, citing unspecified family circumstances.
The $16 billion outfit will plug the gap in the C suite. But my question is, “When will the company get back on the growth track, generate services which are “must have”, and have sufficient funds to train booth staff?
In my talk, I mentioned mostly free and advertising supported sources of information. Budgets, despite popular perceptions about intelligence and police entities, are tight. Some of the LexisNexis services are, in my view, very expensive. Using lower cost options makes good fiscal sense. The new Reed Elsevier CFO may find that one business factor difficult to ameliorate.
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2013
Leading Publishers: Not What You Think
September 26, 2013
I took a look at the data in “Sensor Tower Publisher Worth Leaderboard – iOS – All-Categories”. Alas, there were no data about the methodology, the time period, or the criterion. Serious flaws, but the list is interesting. The list contains some suggestive information.
For example, the list does include game application developers, Facebook, and Google. There is only one property — ESPN — that I consider a traditional “publisher” but I have to stretch my own connotation of publisher to make ESPN a familiar face amongst the new kindergarten class.
Absent are folks like Bloomberg and Reuters. These are companies which have spent money on creating applications which provide these publishers with a channel to a mobile and tablet users. With the demise of NEXT (yet another Thomson Reuters’ new media initiative), I wonder if traditional publishers will make a Sensor Tower type list.
The list contains a large number of games along with outfits like Google. A few years ago, I wrote a monograph called Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Perhaps Google really is a publisher and not an online advertising company.
Assume the listing is accurate for a mobile/tablet demographic. The failure of a traditional publisher to crack the Top 40 underscores the rather disappointing results from the Herculean effort expended by publishers to remain in the game.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2013
Washington Post Journalist Comments on Bezos Deal
September 20, 2013
One of the esteemed reporters at the Washington Post calls for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who famously bought the paper this summer, to respect the talent already in place at that historic publication. TechEye.net informs us, “Top WaPo Journalist Pens Open Missive to Jeff Bezos.” The award-winning Gene Weingarten recalls another time when he faced demands from on high at another publication:
“Weingarten presents an anecdote from his days editing the Tropic where publishes exerted pressure on editorial to run positive stories about corporate masters Knight-Ridder, ‘inevitably uncritical, nakedly celebratory, and drenched in self-promotion’. He and his colleagues declined, as they were ‘trying to establish a feisty, pugnacious identity, and being a corporate suckup toady lickspittle didn’t fit in with our plans’.”
We love that quote, which so colorfully sets the stage for any changes Bezos may attempt to impose on his new property. This time, though, Weingarten seems at least a little optimistic. He writes:
“You have bought a place filled with enormously talented and dedicated journalists who are, at the moment, terrified at the prospect of change we don’t really understand. . . . You are obviously a good businessman. I hope you have a clear vision of where to take this remarkable enterprise.”
We hope so, too. Investigative journalism, as important as it is to our society, has been fading fast. Will Bezos be the one to save it?
Cynthia Murrell, September 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ebook Sales Get Flushed Down The Toilet
September 15, 2013
Digital books are supposed to replace the dead tree book, but according to the Rough Type blog in the post, “The Flattening Of eBook Sales” says they are do not doing too well. Nicholas Carr, the author, noted at the beginning of 2013 that ebook sales would follow the trend of 2012: decline sales. He pulls data from the Association of American Publishers that state eBook sales only grew 5% in the first 2013 quarter. Adult ebook sales were only up 13.6% and children sales were down 30.1%, partially due to there not being a big book a la The Hunger Games.
The digital book revolution is losing the pressure to chug along and many of the reasons that Carr lists are true. Some types of books are better suited in print:
“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audio books have long been, rather than an outright substitute.”
There is also that any Americans have no interest in the format, e-readers are slowing in sales when up against a tablet, and the price difference between a paper book and an ebook is not that much. Do you want my opinion? Staring at a computer screen makes me dislike going home to read a book on my tablet. I like the tactile difference with a printed book and also it does not require a battery, unless you count my imagination.
Whitney Grace, September 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Electronic Book Sales Declining
September 11, 2013
Interesting. I didn’t think the move toward digital books was fad, but now Rough Type reports on “The Flattening of E-Book Sales.” Blogger Nicholas Carr noted in January that e-book sales had declined last year, and now shares evidence that the slide continues. He writes:
“The Association of American Publishers reports that in the first quarter of 2013, overall e-book sales in the U.S. trade market grew by just 5 percent over where they were in the same period in 2012. The explosive growth of the last few years has basically petered out, according to the AAP numbers.”
Why? Carr suggests several reasons, including my own suspicion—that enthused early adopters have just about finished transitioning their libraries to the digital format. Other factors could include the realization that e-books work better for some sorts of books than others. Perhaps more importantly, e-books save readers much less cash than expected; most are not much cheaper than a paperback version. He also cites the waning popularity of dedicated e-readers:
“Most intriguing, to me, is the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?”
I personally don’t see why they would be, but then I’ve never worked with an e-reader myself—I didn’t see the point when the much more versatile tablets were hitting the market. Is there something special about the e-reader experience?
See the write-up for more facts and figures on e-book sales. Will the decline continue, or will the market settle into a post-novelty plateau?
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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