Elsevier Makes a Brave Play to Steal Wikipedias Users
October 9, 2017
Is Wikipedia about to be unseated in the world of academic publishing? Elsevier thinks they can give the crowdsourced, yet flawed, info hub a serious run for its money. Money, being the key word, according to a recent TechDirt article, “Elsevier Launching Rival to Wikipedia by Extracting Scientific Definitions Automatically from Author’s Texts.”
According to the piece:
Elsevier is hoping to keep researchers on its platform with the launch of a free layer of content called ScienceDirect Topics, offering an initial 80,000 pages of material relating to the life sciences, biomedical sciences and neuroscience. Each offers a quick definition of a key term or topic, details of related terms and relevant excerpts from Elsevier books.
Seems like it makes sense, right? Elsevier has all this academic information at their fingertips, so why send users elsewhere on the web for other information. This extraction system, frankly, sounds pretty amazing. However, TechDirt has a beef with it.
It’s typical of Elsevier’s unbridled ambition that instead of supporting a digital commons like Wikipedia, it wants to compete with it by creating its own redundant versions of the same information, which are proprietary. Even worse, it is drawing that information from books written by academics who have given Elsevier a license.
It’s a valid argument, whether or not Elsevier is taking advantage of its academic sources by edging into Wikipedia’s territory. However, we have a hunch their lawyers will make sure everything is on the up and up. A bigger question is whether Elsevier will make this a free site or have a paywall. They are in business to make money, so we’d guess paywall. And if that’s the case, they’d better have a spectacular setup to draw customers from Wikipedia.
Patrick Roland, October 9, 2017
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