Elsevier: A Fun House Mirror of the Google?
August 5, 2019
Is Elsevier like Google? My hunch is that most people would see few similarities. In Google: The Digital Gutenberg, the third monograph in my Google trilogy, I noted:
- Google is the world’s largest publisher. Each search results page output is a document. Those documents make Google an publisher of import.
- Google uses its technology to create a walled garden for content. Rules must be followed to access that content for certain classes of users; for example, advertisers. I know that this statement does not mean much, if anything to most people, but think about AMP, its rules, and why it is important.
- Google is a content recycler. Original content on Google is usually limited to its own blog posts. The majority of content on Google is created by other people, and some of those people pay Google a variable, volatile fee to get that content in front of users (who, by the way, are indirect content generators).
Therefore, Google is the digital Gutenberg.
Now Elsevier:
- Elsevier published content for a fee from a specialized class of authors.
- Elsevier, like other professional publishers, rely on institutions for revenue who typically subscribe to services, an approach Google is slowly making publicly known and beginning to use.
- Elsevier is an artifact of the older Gutenberg world which required control or gatekeepers to keep information out of the wrong hands.
What’s interesting is that one can consider that Google is becoming more like Elsevier? Or, alternatively, Elsevier is trying to become more like Google?
The questions are artificial because both firms:
- See themselves as natural control points and arbiters of data access
- Evidence management via arrogance; that is, what’s good for the firm is good for those in the know
- Revenue diversification has become a central challenge.
I thought of my Digital Gutenberg work when I read “Elsevier Threatens Others for Linking to Sci-Hub But Does So Itself.” I noted this statement (which in an era of fake news may or may not be accurate):
I learned this morning that the largest scholarly publisher in the world, Elsevier, sent a legal threat to Citationsy for linking to Sci-Hub. There are different jurisdictional views on whether linking to copyright material is or is not a copyright violation. That said, the more entertaining fact is that scholarly publishers frequently end up linking to Sci-Hub. Here’s one I found on Elsevier’s own ScienceDirect site ….
Key point: We do what we want. We are the gatekeepers. Very Googley.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2019
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