…California, through its cancellation, has nevertheless maintained its position unambiguously. It does not need ongoing journal subscriptions through ScienceDirect. Put another way: A major customer’s perceived value in the product offering has declined. Elsevier apparently no longer has the pricing power it once could assert.

Leakage

The source of the value decline is no mystery. Joe Esposito argued more than a year ago that ‘Sci-Hub is an unacknowledged reserve army prepared to enter the battle with publishers,’ noting elsewhere in the piece that time “is not on Elsevier’s side.”

But Sci-Hub is not alone. Sci-Hub is one of a series of services through which content is ‘leaking’ out of publisher sites through to users. While some of these sites are illicit and pirate, others like SSRN and institutional repositories are accepted parts of the ecosystem, and still others are like ResearchGate, whose intentions vary by observer.

Read more at: Schonfeld, R. (2019). Is the Value of the Big Deal in Decline? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/03/07/value-big-deal-leakage/

Keep up with daily development’s via Schonfeld’s Twitter feed, @rschon.

After reading Schonfeld’s comprehensive, detailed description of the acquisition, I myself admit having mixed feelings about what is admittedly a savvy strategic move by the Big E. Why?

To me, this acquisition provides one more example of the failure of academic libraries (i.e., non-profit entities) to cooperate more closely on cross-institutional non-profit solutions for the researchers they support. Yes, libraries did succeed at rolling out institutional repositories in many cases. But in the process of doing so, they often neglected to consider the bigger picture of the research lifecycle stretching from the lab to the final showcase – as well as intellectual property protection issues for their own solutions.

In the case of recent Elsevier acquisitions (Schonfeld describes these in detail), lack of systematic cross-institutional coordination across the “research showcasing lifecycle” by academic non-profits left the door wide open to commercial entities to swoop in and fill the gap by buying up bits of the lab-to-showcase puzzle, piece-by-piece.

As Dan Tonkery notes in a commentary to the Schonfeld article:

It is not the first time that CDL [California Digital Library] and other academic libraries have designed a product or service to only find out that their non for profit work ended up in the hands of a commercial company that was later sold off. Of course the original developers often go without compensation or recognition. The control of intellectual property at the university level is much better controlled in the sciences where new drugs are developed or medical devices, but unfortunately library tools are not so valued.

What’s to regret here? Sure, a trusted commercial partner has stepped in to, as Schonfeld says, “support academic science.” But better cooperation across institutional borders on support strategies for issues all libraries face might have led to global non-profit solutions.

Does the non-profit aspect matter? Everyone has their own answer to this, but what if bepress had gone to a non-academic financial conglomerate, as in the case of Web of Science? In the case of bepress, Schonfeld states:

When the bepress board decided to sell, the bidding for it this summer included interest from both private equity firms and a variety of purchasers with strategic interests.

Monday I got an email from Clarivate:

As a publishing author represented within Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics, you require the latest news and resources to stay current in your area of research. That’s why we think you’ll benefit from getting valuable research information.

From time to time, Web of Science Author Connect® works with other companies to provide you with information about relevant product and service offerings that may be of interest to you.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.

Additional Reading

Schonfeld, R. (2017). Elsevier Acquires bepress. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/08/02/elsevier-acquires-bepress/