The first (and most important) driver of change

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The first (and most important) driver of change
the virtual user (consumer)

• Professor David Nicholas
• CIBER, UCL Centre for Publishing
• School of Library, Archive and Information
  Studies
• University College London
• www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk

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Not PowerPoint puff

• Based on five years of evaluating how the virtual
  scholar behaves
• Analysed several million of them using robust
  methods. We have never had such a wealth of data
  the conclusions bare serious consideration
• CIBER have produced more than 100 peer reviewed
  articles to disseminate the findings

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Consumerism arrives with a bang in the scholarly
sector

• Although some slow to wake up to this fact
• The essential ingredients
• Digitisation
• Disintermediation
• Massive and ever-increasing choice
• Easy and unlimited access thanks to wholesale
  digitisation and search engines

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Market features (1)

• Massive and global, in which consumer immensely
  powerful and unchained the consumer is King
• The commodity (scholarly information) is
  extremely (and surprisingly) popular
• It is volatile and promiscuous
• One which encourages a vertical rather than
  horizontal form of behaviour
• One in which people view/skim rather than read

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Market features (2)

• One in which authority is increasingly difficult
  to establish and up for grabs
• Where visibility is everything
• Where Search engines create a semblance of order
  (but also stoke the flames)

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Market changes and impacts

• Seen nothing yet - still relatively early days
  and most of what is know is based on e-journals
  the early leader
• But we are now at a tipping point with the
  arrival of e-books, a somewhat more consumer
  product, which touches areas of the market yet to
  be untouched by the digital transition

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E-books the accelerator

• Digitally enfranchises
• university students,
• further education students,
• humanities scholars,
• the general public
• Liberates textbooks and monographs
• Together we have enormous combustion in the
  virtual scholar environment

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Market weaknesses (1)

1. Insufficiently user responsive - lacks
   real-time, robust consumer research. Hugely
   dangerous when the user is determining
   everything. The future is now, examine it. Need
   the concept of the e-observatory and there is
   hope.
2. Stakeholders falling-out. Too busy falling out
   with each other (Google, libraries/publishers)
3. Still not a genuinely consumer market (like
   e-shopping). Still too interventionist/command-dri
   ven, result of much evangelism, baggage

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Market weaknesses (2)

• Lacks confidence (in quarters). Desperate and
  sometimes misguided attempts to hitch a ride on
  YouTube, facebook and the like.
• But generally slow to innovate or learn lessons.
• Look at huge growth in virtual communities and
  social networking, but has hardly touched
  scholarly services. (might come via e-books).
• Why such little peer help?
• Why are citations OK in helping people find
  valuable material, when downloads are not?
• Why not taking a stronger lead on personalisation?

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Stakeholder reports 1 Libraries are between a
rock and a hard place

• All the key stakeholders are being seriously
  challenged but libraries most exposed and e-books
  could prove the tipping point
• 1) Academic taxes are perceived to be high per
  student 2) they occupy large amounts of prime
  space, largely unchanged by the digital
  transition 3) they have low visibility 4) have
  not done enough in terms of outcomes
• Librarians (and the information community
  generally), should consider whether federated
  search engines, portals institutional
  repositories and information literacy is really
  going to create a brave new world? Or would they
  be better staffing the e-observatories?

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Stakeholder reports 2 Publishers in a
disintermediated world could be doing better

• Consumers not interested in distinctions that
  once made in a physical world, like that between
  books and journals. But their organisations are
  often structured along these lines.
• The (long) honeymoon with libraries has probably
  ended and its time to re-orientate yourself
  towards the user, the e-consumer.
• Understand that the user/consumer will eclipse
  the author in importance and you will have to
  shift your resources in response
• Some of the products still look as though they
  came out of the Ark
• Perceptions of what constitutes brand are
  changing and not sure if this is understood.

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Stakeholder report 3 Users should be really
benefiting from a world full of rich information
choices

• But there is a danger that an actual dumbing down
  has occurred, with many users exhibiting poor
  information awareness and skills.
• How much of that activity we see in bucket loads
  is actually positive, beneficial and not
  time-wasting?
• The download cannot be regarded anymore to be a
  sign of customer satisfaction

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End

• In the scholarly environment the user
  (supplicant) had died, long live the consumer
  (the driver)!