A Workshop organised by The Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum, with support from DGXII of the Commission of the European Communities, and held at Purmerend, The Netherlands, May 1997
The workshop - Financing Biotechnology Databases was held at the Golden Tulip Hotel, Purmerend, The Netherlands in May 1997. It was organised by The Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum, with support from DGXII of the Commission of the European Communities.
The Role of the Commercial Publisher -- Karel Leeflang
The word “commercial” is often uttered with a slight degree of distaste; especially in academic circles, and very often when publishing is involved. Yet, if one looks up these words in the New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus, we find:
| Commercial: | concerned with commerce. |
| Commerce: | the exchange of goods especially on a large scale. |
| Publisher: | someone who arranges the multiplication of copies of a work (book, music, etc.) and for their handling by distributive agencies. He remunerates or is remunerated by the author or performer according to the terms of the contract made between them. |
Overall, there is little to be ashamed of here!
In the scientific arena, we find three types of publisher. The Commercial Publishers are companies who are usually financially sound, and aim to provide long term continuity. They are owned by shareholders who put up capital and want some return, and so want to minimise the risk and see a continuation of their returns.
Next we have the Society Publishers who are more often than not “not for profit” and aim to match their costs with their incomes and so serve their members. Finally, we have the Government Publishers who are national or supranational and who are totally or largely sponsored by government grants to serve the (political) interest of a country (for instance providing medical information).
Commercial and society publishers have long competed with each other in the free market, on a more or less equal footing. In the recent past however, the governmental publishers have started to influence certain markets by providing cheap competition to existing services. While these are often welcomed by the customer, they actually distort the market and do not have the continuity “published” products require. A particular example of this is the recent decision by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA to offer access to their MEDLINE database for “free”. Users from all over the world will be able to access the database on the World Wide Web for little or no money. This policy will certainly distort the secondary biomedical literature database market and could almost be given as an example of “dumping”. In fact, such a policy could alter the market to such a degree that other non-subsidised products might be forced out of business, leaving the way open for the subsidised American product to perhaps later raises prices, or restrict access.
A danger with any government-based project is that politics change, and so today’s “free” can be tomorrow’s “fee”. Society and commercial publishers usually have a longer term policy and, certainly in the case of commercial producers, an obligation to continue to service all their customers with a project. Few publishers are therefore happy with subsidised products, even if they are receiving the subsidy, as this indicates that the market is unwilling to bear the costs of the product in question and so there must be a query as to the project’s usefulness (this is not always the case in areas where customers cannot pay: thus subsidised products do have a role in the developing world).
This debate has gone on for some years but it is now becoming more strident as we enter the “new information era”. Why this is so is unclear. Speaking for my own company, Elsevier intends to be the preferred global scientific information provider — whatever the media in use — and thus it is clear that (commercial) scientific publishing will continue to look to serve the market, the shareholder, one’s employer and the global need; and these are all more or less, the same.
The traditional STM publisher:
Little if anything here will change with the new technologies. Scientists wish to and do trust their journals (as information sources), they need the prestige gained by publication in accepted titles, and they need their information to be filtered (there is still too much). They are therefore still supporting these titles even though there is a great deal of discussion as to what changes might take place. So far, and the evidence is that this will remain so for the immediate future, the changes we are witnessing are technical. We are seeing new delivery mechanisms such as diskette, CD ROM, and online appear beside paper, and we are also able to “slice” and re-format the products for the customers. The coming of HTML and web software are offering new challenges and opportunities, and the Internet - and especially now the WWW applications - have greatly focused attention; but it is interesting to note that, despite the amazing popularity of the Internet, it still has a long way to go before it become the really ubiquitous service. Thus, by December 1996: there were a total of 35 million users, US 25 million and the forecast is that by December 2000: 163 million users, US 81 million; but this is less than the population of UK, France, Germany, together.
Of course the Internet will have some major long-term impacts, but already the key question about information on the internet is QUALITY. Some say that unverified data is no data. Information has to be qualified and defined, and refereed and authorised. And such quality is expensive to produce. Expanding the distribution channels does not change this basic truth and so far we have seen more failures than successes in this arena. Sad to say, but this is not unreasonable, so far the Internet has stimulated interest and fascination with information whilst flooding the world with a lot of junk material. This is not to say that everything on the net is junk, but it is true that serious information gatherers are often frustrated at the lack of quality control, refereeing, maintenance and long-term stability and even navigation facets that are essential to good information services.
The Intranets, where data and information can be refereed and curated are, already, larger than the Internet. This is the way, surely, to go and so we might soon see a new role for the publisher - that of the Scientific Information Provider where information is integrated and delivered in quality assured packages.
The largest part of scientific communication is still carried in the hard copy journal — or the off-line text. The on-line text market has until now been dominated by the secondary literature databases but this is being added to with full text on-line. We now need and are building on-line information management systems (one stop shops) where problems can be identified and solved in a cost-effective manner. For this to work we need critical masses of quality information. We need to integrate primary and secondary, and factual, information. Elsevier has therefore recently bought MDL to allow us to produce such a linked product/programme. And we all need to work with institutes like the EBI. Elsevier is also working with customers to produce training services, and scientific services, and with Microsoft to gain access to the modern software needed to reach a mass market. Overall the publisher’s job remains the same, to offer quality materials on a long-term basis to the market. To do this one needs a critical mass, capital, a sufficient market and a good customer base. This raises copyright and investment protection issues as well as marketing ethics. The commercial publishing world will continue to invest in these fields and will produce market-driven solutions. But they must not be undermined by subsidies from short-term players only anxious to follow a political message while it suits them. If information is important, it is worth keeping for the immediate, medium, and long-term future. One cannot do that without a long-term vision.