Competências Básicas de Investigação
Científica e de Publicação
Lecture 9: Trends in the STM
information industry
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A brief history of scientific publishing
• Scientific societies first began to form the seventeenth century and grew
out of informal meetings held by people interested in the new
experimental science
• The Royal Society began in this way in 1645 [Medical Society of Bahia
established 1808]
• At that time, the act of publishing academic inquiry was controversial, and
widely ridiculed. It was not at all unusual for a new discovery to be
announced as an anagram, reserving priority for the discoverer, but
indecipherable for anyone not in on the secret: both Newton and Leibniz
used this approach
• As the Royal Society grew there came a point where it became easier to
exchange ideas as written notes and letters. The journal Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society was first published in 1665.
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A brief history of scientific publishing
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A brief history of scientific publishing
• The rapid growth in volume and types of scientific research after the
second world war meant that many new journals were launched by
commercial publishers
• The process of peer review became widespread at this time as editors
became more selective, and the volume and complexity of scientific
information increased
• The emergence of the internet has allowed new forms of scientific
publishing to evolve
• The technology underlying publishing is becoming increasingly involved in
the management and accessibility of huge amounts of complex
information – hence linking to bioinformatics
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How is the STM information industry
defined?
• The sum of the commercial, not-for-profit and
government entities directly or indirectly dependent
on the creation and/or use of the results of scientific,
technological and medical research.
• e.g. higher education, knowledge industries (pharmabiotech, aerospace, etc), government.
• Challenge: “The world is awash with data. The
problem that professionals face is not the
overabundance of information. It is the lack of good
filters.” [TR]
• Much of the new technology has to do with finding
things
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STM market statistics
• There are 5000–10,000 journal publishers globally, of which around
5000 are included in the Scopus database.
• There were about 28,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed journals in
mid 2012, collectively publishing about 1.8–1.9 million articles a
year.
• The number of articles published each year and the number of
journals have both grown steadily for over two centuries, by about
3% and 3.5% per year respectively.
• The reason is the equally persistent growth in the number of
researchers, which has also grown at about 3% per year and now
stands at between 6 and 9 million.
• The USA continues to dominates the global output of research
papers with a share of about 21% but the most dramatic growth
has been in China and East Asia.
• PubMed indexes almost 21 million articles, with about 800.000 new
articles added each year.
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STM market statistics
Total market: $29.8b; right panel does
not include Geophysical: $23.5b
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Scientific publishing is a very profitable
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Some fundamental problems with the
‘print’ business model
• Prices linked to the exponential growth in
the amount of data being published
• Subscription charge increases: 200% in last
ten years - pressure on library budgets,
reduction in number of subscriptions
• Publisher retention of copyright and
therefore control
• “Excessive” profits: 35%+ profit margins
• Restrictive online access - the bundle deal
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What are the main drivers of change?
• Growth in and complexity of output
• Speed, scale and complexity of technological
change
• e.g. “omics”, massively parallel experimental designs,
image-based technologies
• Need to manage, coordinate, justify societal
investments
• Stagnation of traditional markets, breakdown
of subscription business model
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What are the catalysts of change?
• Digital information technologies, increased
importance of metadata
• Reinvention of the publishing process – Open
access (OA)
• Spread of the “soundness not significance”
peer review criterion adopted by OA
“megajournals” such as PLOS ONE
• Quantification of benefits – Altmetrics and the
infamous Impact Factor
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The emergence of Open Access
Clockwise: Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen, Pat
Brown and David Lipman
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History of sequence info => open access
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Key features of ‘open access’ business model
• Free, immediate access online
• Unrestricted use
• Author retains copyright (Creative Commons
licencing)
• Papers are deposited in a public online archive such
as Pubmed Central and Pubmed Central Europe
• Author/funder pays for publication
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Open access mandates
• National Institute of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy – 2008
• Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth – 2011
• EC says that it is aiming for 60% of all European publicly funded
research articles to be open access by 2016 - 2012
• Finch Group Report – June 2012
• RCUK Policy on Open Access – July 2012, amended March 2013
• Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) –
February 2013
• White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) –
February 2013
• Green almost unanimously favoured over Gold (Exception UK)
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PMC growth
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OA charges
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Beware: predatory publishers
• Some publishers and journals have attempted to
exploit the business model of open access
publishing by charging large fees without
providing the editorial and publishing services
associated with more established and legitimate
journals.
• "Beall's List” sets forth criteria for categorizing
predatory publications and lists publishers and
independent journals that meet those criteria
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PLOS ONE
• PLOS ONE (originally PLoS ONE) is an open access
journal published by the Public Library of Science since
2006.
• It covers primary research from any discipline within
science and medicine.
• All submissions go through an internal and external
pre-publication peer review, but are not excluded on
the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence
to a scientific field.
• The PLOS ONE online platform employs a "publish
first, judge later" methodology, with post-publication
user discussion and rating features.
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PLOS ONE size and IF
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Some PLOS ONE clones
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Sage Open ca. 150
NPG Scientific Reports, ~500/y
BMJ Open
CoB Open Biology
PLoS ONE 25k
IEEE Access
BMC Research Notes, BMC tot ca. 24k
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STM Publisher’s response
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Organic growth – favors OA
Pricing – “big deal”, cost per download
Platforms – consortia services
Platforms – “content enhancement”
Workflow tools and analytics
Acquisitions
Payer transition – APCs and value
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Workflow - Article 2.0
 Articles are automatically annotated to identify all chemical structures mentioned in the text.
 N2S conversion enables InChI look-up
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The End!
• Make sure your hypothesis is well-rooted in the current
literature
• Test your main assumptions at the beginning, not the end
of data collection
• Be clear on which journal you want to publish in and why
• Make sure your writing is well-structured and that the
purpose of the study is clear from the start
• Aim high, and use rejection as a means to do improve
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