Industry trends


FEATURE


Evolution, revolution or something else?


Siân Harris reports back from the ALPSP annual conference in September on discussions about the future of the scholarly publishing industry


happens almost every time that scholarly publishers or academic librarians get together. The difference is that, while those other industries no doubt also anticipate changing customer expectations and punishing economic factors, their products are still physical. In contrast, the past decade or so


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t’s hard to imagine a group of, say, furniture manufacturers or chocolate makers gathering regularly to discuss whether their industry will exist in five years’ time. But this is exactly what


has seen an overwhelming shift from physical to virtual in the products and services that scholarly publishers and libraries provide. With electronic products, the expectations of


‘If Pfizer had a journal and published the research that it funded, would scientists accept that?’


users are very different – as the music industry has found to its cost. Issues such as pricing, access, long-term support and the rights of the content creator have all come up for debate. Against such a backdrop of uncertainty, it


was no surprise that the topic of disruptive change came up again at the ALPSP conference, held in September near Oxford in the UK. The scene was set in a post in the Scholarly Kitchen blog last year by Michael Clarke, executive vice president for product and market development at Silverchair Information Systems, which asked ‘Why hasn’t scientific publishing been disrupted already?’ As Clarke pointed out at the conference,


‘The web was meant to disrupt this industry, but the organisations that existed in this space 20 years ago are still by and large there today.’ The reason, he argued, is that the


DEC 2011/JAN 2012 Research Information 27


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