Reed Elsevier business model at risk? European Commission calls for open source publishing
The UK’s Guardian reports:
The European Commission [executive body of the European Union], which controls one of the world’s largest science budgets, has backed calls for free access to publicly funded research in a move that could force a major change in the business model for publishers such as Reed Elsevier.
From Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for digital agenda, “Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and they need seamless access to raw data.”
This follows the UK government’s mandate that government funded research be free to view by 2014. David Willets, the universities and science minister told the Gaurdian, “If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn’t be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it.”
Professionals, who are paying first to get their research published and then to pay to get access to their research and others’ research are waking up.
The subscription model has come under attack from some scientists, who argue that publishing companies are making fat profits on the back of taxpayer-funded research.
Elsevier publishes more than 2,000 journals with a staff of about 7,000. It made a profit last year of £768m on revenues of £2.1bn, giving a margin of about 37%.
Publishers argue that they need to be paid for the quality they deliver. “We have large editorial editorial departments and databases of published content.”
I’m glad to see Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European commissioner for research, innovation and science, blow that argument aside.
We must give taxpayers more bang for their buck. Open access to scientific papers and data is an important means of achieving this.
Large editorial teams of highly qualified people, data bases of vetted and precise content, quality over free, accuracy over speed. From whom did we hear those arguments 7 or 8 years ago? Newspapers and legal publishers like Martindale-Hubbell, ironically a Reed Elsevier Company.
Professor Adam Tickell of the University of Birmingham, who contributed to the Commission’s report, told Requters he sees a rapid and substantial reduction in the cost of subscriptions.
With the support of the EU, UK government and major charities, such as the Wellcome Trust, open access to research findings will soon be a reality.
Though huge publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Thomson Reuters may poo poo things, we’re seeing a trend.
In February, over 6,000 academics from around the world boycotted publishing for Reed Elsevier because of extraordinary subscription prices being charged for access to content the academics freely wrote and edited. In March, Reed Elsevier reduced the subscription to one publication by 47% when it realized its position to the boycott wasn’t flying in financial circles.
As cost effective services and distribution channels are built on solutions such as WordPress and mobile applications, you can expect open source professional publishing to become the way of the world. Not only does it make sense money wise, but the advancement of knowledge in any field (law, science, medicine etc) stands to grow and accelerate with blog like publishing and the use of other social media platforms.
This doesn’t mean the large publishers will be pushed aside. But they will need to adapt. They’ll need to develop business models that provide open source platforms, enable and educate professionals on publishing in short form and ‘socially sharable’ content, curate the best information, and provide innovate search and discovery tools.