SSP2008 – New Content and Business Models in the New Publishing World Order

1. Online Communities: A World of Opportunity (Sharon Mombru – BlueInsights)

Online community functions: networking (Facebook, LinkedIn)/ info sharing (YouTube, Limewire)/ info organizing (Connotea)/ social discovery (Twine, Plum, BlueInsights) – people prefer to get info from someone they trust or know, networks filter and distribute info

Benefits of sharing: visibility for brand/ content, drives traffic back to site, alternative sources of revenue

Business models should shift to article based search/ recommendations instead of journal based. Free promotion for content owners through sharing.

2. AACR Publishing: Portals as Products (Mike Beveridge – Am Assoc for Cancer Research)

Market journals to institutions as package covering breadth/ depth of cancer research. Add value to existing subscribers and try to find new customers – trying to do this through portals.

Portals: aggregate content of all types/ enable production of meta-content

Cancer Reviews Online – pulls review content from original journal sites, free access for subscribers to at least 1 journal, showcase reviews from all journals, expand audience for all reviews

Cancer Prevention Journals Portal – aggregates prevention articles, based on article topic not type, free to all currently – will move to sep product in 2009

Portals position publishers for article economy.

3. iTunes for Scholarly Publishing? Debate
Geoffery Bilder (Cross Ref) + David Durand (Tizra)

Bilder:
Development of iTunes by Apple was very disruptive to music industry. What would happen if someone did the same for publishing industry, especially someone other than publishers?

Assumptions about publishing: “Publishers and librarians are conspiring to annoy researchers.” – our interfaces are terrible.

Have to break out of publisher/ institutional silos. Only place that orgs content by publisher is Frankfort Book Fair. Researchers collaborate w/ others outside institutions and geographic area.

We don’t know who our audience is.

PPV pricing model is mental. iTunes model might help with pricing and distribution of topic specific content like disaster relief articles – stuff in one place/ pricing simple and cheap/ interface easy to use. Simple and cheap pricing harder in iPub, but content aggregation is possible.

“We have the equivalent of the iPod – it’s called paper.”

Publishers should move into this area before someone else (Microsoft/ Google) does.

Durand:
{This guy is like 8 feet tall!}
{I saw him later and he isn't 8 feet tall.}

“Books are not sausages.” – different points of view,

Sales doesn’t have to be tacky. Figure out what people want and give it to them.

Customer relationships are changing.

Work with competitors to find customers - likely to buy things on specific topics regardless of publisher.

You can organize and make content attractive to your audience better than someone larger like Google can. Work in smaller groups to be more nimble and respond better to market.