Times' Heavy-Handed Attack on Textbook Publishers

I was taken aback to read this one-sided editorial in the New York Times applauding Washington state's proposed law that would require publishers to disclose prices to professors considering adopting textbooks and exhorting colleges and universities to become publishers themselves to save students from those money-grubbing textbook peddlers. (Well, the editorial didn't literally call them that, but the implication was there.)

I don't disagree with the wisdom of professors taking the cost of a textbook into consideration when they adopt it. I know when I taught college courses I was very aware of the cost of the materials I asked my students to buy, and I guess I assumed that other instructors and professors would do the same. Perhaps not. But whoa folks....Hold the venom.

This position is an odd one for the Times, a profitable publisher, to take. The editorial calls textbook revisions "constant issuing of lucrative but little changed new editions — publishing’s version of planned obsolescence." It also complains that new costly electronic resources that publishers provide (for no additional charge) are "marginally useful."

As I've said many times before and as I'll doubtless say many times again, when other organizations (like libraries and universities) become publishers, they start to smell and act like publishers. They start to have expenses like publishers. They start to charge like publishers. I say, let the competition begin. If somebody can provide high quality educational material for less money, have at it.

Maybe publishers can become more efficient. The market can decide what's useful (electronic materials) and what isn't. Bring it on. But let's stop villifying an industry that is providing valuable products and services and creating a more educated public.

The Plural of Anecdote is Data

Perhaps the most memorable quote of the STM meeting was dropped by MIT Sloan School of Management Economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who directs the Center for Digital Business. (It turns out the quote is attributable to Berkeley Political Scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who apparently coined it in the 60s or 70s. Lots of people quote its opposite [The plural of anecdote is NOT data] and try to attribute the source of that quote...Isn't Google great for trivia questions?)

Of course, his talk had a lot more going for it: he presented an analysis of information flows in organizations and correlated individuals at the hub of information exchanges with higher revenue-producing employees. (Again somewhat counterintuitive, I suppose depending on the industry.) In the executive recruiter industry he presented, it makes sense that those who are at the center of communication may also be the biggest rainmakers or producers as the industry is by definition about networking.

Measuring productivity among knowledge workers was another main theme of the talk. He noted wryly that the simple equation productivity = output/input suffers only from the difficulty of measuring, well, inputs and outputs. (It did remind us, however, that working longer hours doesn't increase productivity, because you are increasing input...)

He summarized the best practices of digital firms, many of which seem to be common sense (e.g. "Hire the best people") but described more fully ways to implement them (Set up rigorous screening and extensive interview processes.)

The Bizarre Wisdom of Crowds

At the spring STM meeting (that's the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers) in Cambridge, Massachusetts this week, University of Chicago Law School Professor Cass Sunstein explained the somewhat counterintutive results of the accuracy of group predictions. For example, where more than 50% of a group has some knowledge about a topic, as the group gets larger, the average of the individual's predictions will approach 100% accuracy. Where fewer than 50% have the necessary expertise or information, the average prediction will likely fail. Examples of successes in this area include Oscar winners, presidential elections, the number of jelly beans in a jar, and horse races. A notable failure was predicting Bush's Supreme Court candidates.

Perhaps even more interesting is that prediction markets are more accurate than surveys, perhaps because people have to "buy into" them, so a self-selected group of people who think they know something participate, increasing the chances of hitting the greater than 50% expertise level.

And surveys are more accurate than deliberative processes, because people, even if they are not informed, are making their own predictions and not being swayed by group dynamics.

One of the surprising side effects is that boards of directors tend to be most effective when they are contentious! In such cases, presumably, the board members continue to think for themselves, despite the strong opinions of others.

A caveat of these markets is that they only work where the outcome is ultimately measurable. Companies are beginning to use prediction markets internally for sales forecasting and validating product launch dates.

This one one of several examples from the meeting of a valuable talk outside the typical scope of scholarly publishing presentations.

Life in a Start-up

Anne Orens, somebody I've known and respected for almost 15 years since we met at Little, Brown & Company, is the Chief Marketing Officer of a start-up company called Tizra, which is creating software to automate web publishing. Anne gave me a demo a few months ago, and from what I could see, the applications go far beyond scholarly publishing.

This Forbes article provides a glimpse into life at Tizra in the post-dot.com apocalypse world of start-ups. As an independent consultant with a home office, I can appreciate the perks and pitfalls of barking dogs, children doing homework, and the bathrobe dress code.

It looks like funding is on its way. Worth a look.

E-Journal Archiving Gets Real

Portico, the electronical journal archiving organization associated with JSTOR, Mellon, and Ithaka, continues to sign new publishers, according to Publisher Relations Director Toni Tracy. Portico has agreements with some 30 publishers to archive all of their peer reviewed material and 340 participating libraries.

Portico's approach is to ingest and standardize the publisher. This approach is different from the CLOCKSS approach, which caches images from publishers' web pages. The fomer will preserve the content, but not the functionality or design. The latter will preserve the publisher's look and feel. Both organizations commit to migrate the technology and content over time to preserve access.

With both Portico and CLOCKSS, the archive is intended to remain dark until a "trigger event" opens it up. The event may be the discontinuation of a publication, a publisher going out of business, or, in certain cases, the cancellation of a subscription. Portico is now live and ingesting content. CLOCKS is operating a limite two-year trial, after which, the plans are to open the project up to wider participation.

It is good to see concrete progress in the field of archiving electronic journals. As Tim Berners-Lee admonished at CrossRef's annual meeting in November, publishers need to make a will. Nobody likes to think that their organization will not survive. But the prudent course is to plan for demise, and work to make sure the archive remains dark.

My Favorite Web Apps

I've been spending a lot of time on web applications lately, and they are great. In my business, volunteer, and personal lives, I find the range and quality of the offerings to be impressive.

I love Constant Contact for email campaigns. I'm addicted to the reports that you can download. Wearing one of my other hats, as a volunteer for my local Girl Scout service team, I love the Patriot's Trail Girl Scout Council's eCouncil app. (Well, I don't love that it doesn't support Firefox. For that matter, neither does Sovereign Bank's online banking system. Boo). Both Constant Contact and eCouncil allow me to download data into Excel where I can analyze and slice & dice using pivot tables and such.

I also rely on yahoo groups to maintain email lists, links and file libraries for several organizations I help to manage. I also love uploading my photos to Snapfish, sharing them, and letting others pay for their own prints if they want them. I used to order double prints, painstaking label them all and send them off to my family. They probably didn't even want most of them.

The drawback to both of those apps is that the people I'm sharing with are not always web-savvy, or they don't want to have to sign up for something. I find myself doing technical support for them, or I lose them altogether.

Another app I've used but don't have that much use for is business networking site LinkedIn. I've spent my considerable career building up contacts. I'm not sure I want to just give them away. So I will not upload my Outlook contacts file to LinkedIn. I also hesitate to spam people with LinkedIn invitations, so I've taken the approach of only connecting to people who are already in the network.

Finally, I just happily signed up for a Mozy online backup account. Mozy now backs up my data whenever my computer is idle for 30 minutes or more. A few years ago I spent thousands of dollars saving data from a hard drive crash. I never want to go through that again, but setting up a local backup proved to be complicated. A backup that doesn't get run is no backup at all.

So hooray for web apps. Long may they thrive!

XML ebook

AIP has released a free ebook entitled: XML: What's It Good For by Tim Ingoldsby. Based on a well-received talk Tim gave at the Council of Scientific and Engineering Societies Executives (CESSE), the ebook describes the benefits of XML to publishers including a number of examples, from reference linking to new product development.

Disclosure: I helped AIP put the ebook together.

Really Direct Mail

I've decided I love email newsletters. As a recipient I appreciate that they don't clog up my mail table, they don't kill trees, they're easy to act on (or delete), share, and most importantly, unsubscribe from. I wish I could say the same for snail mail.

As a sender (I create newsletters for clients) I can track who opens them, forwards them, clicks on them, or contacts us. They are everything direct mail is supposed to be, but isn't--trackable. And, the response rates are generally MUCH better than printed mailings.

Of course, you have to do it right: use permissioned lists (opt-ins), provide something of value, write a good subject line, time the release properly, and, of course, comply with the CAN-SPAM and other applicable laws.

What's not to love? Accountability and higher reach at a lower cost. Count me in.

A New Appreciation for Archivists

I spent the weekend wading through crumbling remnants of a life: photographs and letters from my Mom's trunk. It was a personal history lesson, and it was also overwhelming. She saved this stuff for 70 years; some seems like trash to me, but maybe it has some hidden significance. How to decide? An archivist would know.

Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an editorial by author David Kahn about the need to adequately fund the National Archives, which has a backlog, er "document surplus," and is struggling to process documents, answer information requests, and provide customer service to researchers. Seems like an activity worth funding.

What's Missing from Institutional Repositories

Cornell PhD students Philip Davis and Matthew Connolly in their D-Lib article "Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace" describe a picture of faculty apathy towards the institutional repository (IR) at Cornell.

After a balanced description of the camps advocating IRs (not easy to do in this day and age), the authors describe some of the reasons faculty don't deposit research in the DSpace IR at Cornell:

1. Faculty prefer to be associated with their research field rather than their institution.

2. Faculty may be concerned about how the practice of depositing articles in an IR will affect their chances to be published in an archival journal, which is still very important to them.

3. Faculty may work in a field where early dissemination of results is not desirable, either for reasons of competition or of completenss, accuracy and quality.

4. Faculty may find the IR technology more difficult or less convenient than posting to a personal or departmental web page.

The authors found that the culture of researcher's discipline was an important component to the use of the IR. For example, the library collection is one area of Cornell's IR that is seeing steady growth. Presumably, the librarians are the most familiar and supportive of the IR, and so use it for their materials.

This study presents actual data (how refreshing) on how it's really going with IRs. Proponents can use the information here to make IRs more successful. Detractors can use it to say they are failing.

The authors don't talk about it, but I think what's really missing here is marketing. People (researchers included) will generally take advantage of a tool, service, or system that benefits them if they know about it. Until IRs have a sense of importance or imprimateur, or unless they provide a place to put stuff that has no other home (teaching materials, grey literature, datasets), it doesn't suprise me that they are underutilized.

Marketing? Isn't that something publishers are pretty good at? But it takes resources.

Once again, we see that as libraries take on the traditional roles of publishers, they need to become more like publishers in order to succeed.

Sue Google Over Copyright? Get In Line

You've undoubtedly seen that Viacom is suing Google over widespread copyright infringement on Google's recent acquisition YouTube. YouTube has been happy to cooperate in removing infringing content once reported, but has aip.org/publishingservices/ebook/AIPXMLebook.pdfbeen unable (unwilling?) to take resonsibility for prohibiting users from posting infringing material.

Does this sound a little familiar? Like publishers suing Google over violating copyright by digitizing books, and Google responding that they'd be happy to exclude any works that they get requests to omit or remove? Except in Google Book Search, it's Google itself that will be doing the deed, not the clueless masses.

Another difference is that YouTube has reached licencing agreements with other content providers, but that talks with Viacom had recently broken down. Not the same approach as that taken with publishers.

Hmmmm....

Why Libraries Matter

Just came across this piece, "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete? 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important"

Writer Will Sherman compares the role of librarians to good web moderators: "the role of the moderator very much parallels the role of the librarian: to safeguard an environment in which knowledge can be accessed and ideas can be shared."

My favorite reason is Number 23: "The internet is a mess." I used to tell my students that the internet was like a library where someone threw all the books on the floor. (I couldn't remember where I stole that from so, of course I Googled it, and according to this site [Check section 8.12] lots of other people have stolen it too.)

Sherman talks a LOT about Google Book Search and doesn't even mention open access ("Number 3: The internet isn’t free" would have been an appropriate place.) Still for librarians and those of us who value them, it's worth a read.

For parents who know the book Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathman or the video performance, I can't get the idea out of my head of John Lithgow reading out the reasons in a sonorous voice ad infinitum. (In the story, Officer Buckle reads lists of safety rules....)

(Credit to j's scratchpad for leading me to the article.)

5 Tips for Creating Case Studies with Impact

In my travels through trade shows and web sites, I have come across many case studies designed to make concrete the services an organization offers—some more effective than others. I'm a fan of thoughtfully and carefully prepared case studies. How can you make sure yours have the most impact? Here are five tips to great case studies:

1. Provide enough customer background to provide context for the project description and for prospects to be able to relate.

2. Describe the issues or problems the customer had before your solution was implemented.

3. Differentiate your solution from the customer's other options.

4. Prove how the customer benefited from the relationship.

5. Include descriptive comments from the customer, explaining the problem, the process, and the outcome.

If you've covered these basics, check out this article by Mark Levy at Marketing Profs for ways to emphasize your "insight" to the solution in your case study.

Social Networking: The Next Generation

I forgot about this article from The Washington Post until today when my ridiculous hunt for a hard-to-find Webkinz for my niece's birthday took my dialing finger and half a tank of gas. You see, she lives across the country from my kids, and they want to be able to interact more. So I thought I'd see if they could play together in real time using the popular stuffed-animals-with-a-life. Unfortunately my search apparently coincided with a Canadian railroad strike which is keeping the popular virtual pets off store shelves in the Northeast, where they are all the rage.

If you have kids between 6 and 12, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, this article is the best explanation I've seen. (The Post web site includes a video demo by the article's author, Ylan Mui.)

The article was published early in February--coincidentally a few days after David Warlick's presentation of "Digital Natives" at the Publishing 2.0 pre-conference seminar of the American Association of Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Conference (AAP/PSP). A digital native is a person who was "born digital". Warlick introduced us to the teenage cyborg with a laptop connected to the internet, a VOIP headset, a cell phone earpiece, and a gaming system all going simultaneously. His point was that this creature isn't going to respond the same way to traditional learning environments as we did, and that we had better adapt in order to reach him.

O brave new world, that has such people in't! The freakiest part is that two of them are mine...

PSP Joins STM in Position on Open Access

In a not-too-surprising move, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers (AAP/PSP) has endorsed the Brussels Declaration issued last month by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).

The Brussels document supports the position that multiple business models are healthy and warns, "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review."

Hotly debated on the listserves (see Liblicense, for example) the declaration is a the next reponse in a series of geographic pronouncements like the Budapest Initiative, the Bethesda Statement, and the Berlin Declaration. (There must be a Saturday Night Live sketch in here somewhere.)

In the meantime, publishers and librarians are experimenting with open access models, which are becoming an accepted part of the scholarly dissemination landscape. Everything in moderation.

Web 2.0 explained

Check out this neat Youtube video entitled Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us—a description of the glories of Web 2.0 complete with a quick explanation of why separating format from content is a powerful thing. The video is by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. For more, see the Digital Ethnography blog.

Search Matters...especially on your own site

In Information Today, Paula Hane summarized an IDC report by Sue Feldman summarized at a recent Fast conference (how's that for a tertiary reference?) about the untapped potential of the web. Apparently, Feldman claims that up to 70 percent of search traffic is actually not going through Google and friends. Rather, people are going directly to the portals they think will have the answers and searching on those sites. The opportunity or challenge is to make sure your site search doesn't stink, and, to monetize the searches by incorporating contextual ads. Fast just happens to have a product that you can use for that, if you decide to leave Googleville.

Closing EPA's Libraries

American Library Association President and Princeton Library Director Leslie Burger calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the New York Times today for closing its libraries. The administration's rationale for the move has been to control the agency's budget, and indeed the proposed 2007 budget cuts $2 million earmarked for the libraries. Since the planned closings were announced in February, many, including EPA scientists, the primary users of the libraries, have hinted that the move is an effort to gut the power of the agency by supressing environmental research. See, for example this press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

To add fuel to their argument, critics point out that the EPA began to shutter the libraries even before Congress acted on next year's budget.

And EPA libraries aren't the only ones being closed. In today's LA Times article on government library closings Tim Reiterman describes researchers upset about US National Air and Space Administartion (NASA) and Department of Energy (DOE) library closings as well.

Government officials have claimed that the physcial libraries are less important than online access, but critics respond by reporting many reports and documents are simply being boxed up and stored away, or worse, destroyed. (Reminds me of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

This example of the caprices of government funding for research availability lends credence to those who fear open access funding models for journals that depend on government agencies may not be sustainable through changes in political administrations.

Wiley and Blackwell Acquisition Runs into Opposition from Library Community

The Information Access Alliance has challenged John Wiley & Sons plans to buy Blackwell Publishing (see the November 17 news release announcing the acquisition). In a letter to the United States Department of Justice, the alliance has asked that the merger be subjected to close antitrust scrutiny. The Information Access Alliance is made up of heavy hitting library organizations: the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Medical Libraries Association (MLA), SPARC, and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

The organizations fear price increases due to consolidation in the industry. The letter mentions that because Blackwell has been so identified with society publishers, its prices have been relatively modest. The authors contrast Blackwell's pricing with Wiley's, citing a Cornell study that found Wiley's prices represent the highest average cost per article of the six largest commercial publishers.

In its announcement, Wiley and Blackwell executives cited the "cultural compatibility" and "complementary strengths" of the two organizations. The combined company would publish over 1200 academic journals.

Todd Carpenter Appointed Managing Director of NISO

Todd Carpenter, most recently Diretor of Business Development at BioOne, is taking over as the Managing Director Spot at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the beginning of September.