born digital - gse research presentation

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GSE Research Limited

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Born Digital: Building a strategy for a new research publishing business

John PetersDirector, GSE Research

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The Red Flag ActEnacted 1865 Repealed 1896

“at least three persons to drive or conduct a locomotive [automobile]...one of such persons shall precede such locomotives on foot by not less than sixty yards and shall carry a red flag constantly displayed and shall warn drivers and riders of horses....”

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Markets and technology in transition

• Protectionism sounds sensible at the time, but looks foolish in hindsight

• Clayton Christensen – Innovators Dilemma - When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. What makes a company great, may kill it, in the face of disruptive technology.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford (possibly)

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Survived……. Failed

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

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Do the “rules” still work? • exclusivity • very high ‘rejection rates’ • rigour (particularly quantitative rigour)• citation scoring

• speed to market• Disintermediation• user-created content• social media• peer evaluation• Globalization• Diversity• socio-economic shuffling of the pack.

Evolutions or evolutions in flux, with their eventual outcome in many cases quite uncertain.

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“Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club which would accept me as a

member”

• Quality?• Exclusivity?

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GSE Research: Born Digital

Research and practice ranging from corporate governance and responsibility, through sustainable business practice, to environmental management and science.

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GSE Research as a scholarly publisher

• GSE subject field is reasonably well-served in trade publishing; less so in connecting scholarly research, policy and practice.

• ‘Parallel play’, when young children play alongside each other, rather than interacting together.

• GSE is too important a field for parallel play to be taking place

• Researchers, policy-makers and practitioners need to be playing with each other

• Properly-constructed scholarly publishing initiative can help

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Speed to market

• GSE is a field which needs speed to market.• Research can often take two or three years (or more)

to complete and write up, and can take a further two or three years to get through review and revision cycles, and then wait to be published.

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Disruptive technology

• GSE is a field where technology is creating chaotic change.

• Self-published ‘non-traditional books’ have exploded to more than 2 million a year (against 300,000 ‘traditional’ books)

• Both Amazon and Apple have released free do-it-yourself e-publishing apps for aspiring authors

• Expect more chaos!

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People are ‘fed up’

• Scholarly publishing is a field where many authors and academics are, to quote a correspondent, “fed up” with traditional publishing approaches.

• What are considered to be– excessive subscription fees– excessive author processing charges– slow and restrictive peer review – slow time to market

all contribute to a supply chain which introduces value-reduction rather than value-adding.

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Walk the talk

• GSE is a field where you have to ‘walk the talk’. • People have had enough of – profiteering– bad behaviour– tax dodging– deceit– greed

• If people won’t accept it from banks or oil companies, we certainly should not expect them to from publishers and academics.

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No more parallel play

• GSE is a field where people want to interact, play together, and develop ideas.

• It’s a field where problems are real, knotty and cross-disciplinary, and the need for solutions is pressing

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Responsible capitalism

• We are aiming to run a responsibly capitalist business– fair but sustainable pricing– profits don’t have to mean profiteering, – we are as transparent as we can reasonably be

• We will publish our revenues annually• We will give back 10% of revenues to community

good causes through the GSE Social Enterprise Fund

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GSE: enabling academic dialogue in the 21st century

The GSE platform has been developed in partnership with Publishing Technology Pub2Web to encourage and support discourse, and to bring the act of publication into the centre of the research process, rather than being the endpoint of it– By encouraging researchers to publish work-in-progress,

blog posts, etc.– Through the post-publication review facilities– By inviting researchers to join the Research Exchange, a

social network to foster discussion, collaboration and mutual encouragement

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A final thought...“When the fear of not making a difference outweighs the fear of making a mistake....that's when you can succeed”

Frank Gehry, October 2002

John.peters@gseresearch.com