Open Access, Open Data Increase Demand for STM

Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty—this according to the most recent report from Simba Information, a leader in media and publishing intelligence. The report STM Online Services 2019-2023focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2016 and 2018, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books. Growth was boosted somewhat by currency exchange in the period. Simba estimates the currency impact at roughly 1% over the two years. Many of the products and services are already considered “must have” information sold in multi-year, multi-million-dollar bundles. As the corpus of data made open by research funder mandates grows, the value publishers provide will shift back toward discovery and integration. The larger players will ultimately gain the most from this new opportunity. They have largely turned their attention to author and researcher engagement—a key point of differentiation and competition between publishers in the STM online services market. “We see it when sophisticated r...
Source: News from STM - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Featured Source Type: news