Delete comment from: DSHR's Blog
Richard Smith, ex-editor of the BMJ, has figured out what Elsevier's "slow AI" is doing:
"The company recognises that science publishing will become a service that scientists will largely run themselves. In a sense, it always has been with scientists producing the science, editing the journals, peer reviewing the studies, and then reading the journals. ... Elsevier have recognised the importance of this trend and are creating their own software platforms to speed up and make cheaper the process of publishing science.
But how, I wondered, can Elsevier continue to make such big profits from science publishing? Now, I think I see. The company thinks that there will be one company supplying publishing services to scientists—just as there is one Amazon, one Google, and one Facebook; and Elsevier aims to be that company. But how can it make big profits from providing a cheap service?
The answer lies in big data. ... Elsevier will come to know more about the world’s scientists—their needs, demands, aspirations, weaknesses, and buying patterns—than any other organisation. The profits will come from those data and that knowledge. The users of Facebook are both the customers and the product, and scientists will be both the customers and the product of Elsevier."
Unfortunately, he's a bit late to the game. I realized the Elsevier had figured this out almost a decade ago when I served on the jury for Elsevier's Grand Challenge . In 2010 I wrote:
"In 2008 I was on the jury for the Elsevier Grand Challenge, a competition Elsevier ran with a generous prize for the best idea of what could be done with access to their entire database of articles. This got a remarkable amount of attention from some senior managers. Why did they sponsor the competition? They understood that, over time, their ability to charge simply for access to the raw text of scholarly articles will go away. Their idea was to evolve to charging for services based on their database instead."
Jan 13, 2018, 1:27:13 AM
Posted to It Isn't About The Technology