Sci Tech Publishers Quiver: Nature Articles Free to View
December 3, 2014
If you are a commercial database publisher, you have had your share of thrills and spills. But now the funding for libraries is modest and not likely to rebound quickly. Publishers whose content has been indexed now want some kind of compensation and even worse a few are putting up their own online services. But the scary part of relying on other people’s content is that some big guns will just roll over and make their content available with ever looser restrictions.
Nature now “permits subscribers and media to share read only versions of its papers.” Nifty idea but for many getting a third party to digest and highlight the important points is pretty useful. In fact, I think it will be sufficiently useful to replace a subscription.
If you wonder how the MBAs at LexisNexis, Cambridge Scientific, and EBSCO will react to this state of affairs, so do I. Maybe there are some other opportunities to pursue?
How will the Nature “marketing” experiment work out? My hunch is that for some sci tech publishers, no marketing trick will work. The companies anchored in the information models of the past have to find a way to pop up a level or two in the game of information.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2014
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One Response to “Sci Tech Publishers Quiver: Nature Articles Free to View”
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Not sure this is quite as quiver-producing as it sounds. From the press release:
” subscribers can share any paper they have access to through a link to a read-only version of the paper’s PDF that can be viewed through a web browser. For institutional subscribers, that means every paper dating back to the journal’s foundation in 1869, while personal subscribers get access from 1997 on.
Anyone can subsequently repost and share this link”
Note that it’s only subscribers who can initiate the sharing and they can only share the link. Then non-subscribers can read (and annotate, which is the important bit) and share, but again they can only share a link.
Very different business model from that of commercial database producers.