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www.epsltd.com
Global Information:
Digital threats and
opportunities
Dan PennyAnalyst
October 2006
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Agenda
Working with China
Information flow and developing countries
Tools for managing global digital content
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Western publishers seeking a foothold in China
Opportunities Western content considered an
essential tool for world-class scientific research
China has committed to increasing its spending on R&D to 2.5% of GDP by 2010
GAPP has suggested that foreign companies involved in S&T publishing may be allowed wider latitude than other content types
Market gap: many of China’s 4,500 scientific journals are low quality, take a long time to publish articles, and are not financially self-supporting
Challenges Chinese libraries face intense
budget pressures; publisher pricing increases faster than library budgets
Chinese market for e-journals levelling out (and prices low; rigid consortia pricing)
Restrictions on foreign participation; regulator GAPP has moved in the last year to further tighten these restrictions
Broad-reaching system of internet filtering
Difficult to reach second tier of customers
Sales must be through official import/export agency
Need to work with partners
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Publisher influence on information flow
There is a greater amount of information coming out of China which publishers seek to manage.
Will an influx of Chinese scholars swell the amount of quality scholarly literature?
The effect may not be large - the 25,000 journals studied in the RIN report carried out by EPS already carry a lot of Chinese research of high quality – although there are bibliographical issues.
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Publisher influence on information flow
How much Chinese content is translated is a matter for peer review and may be down to how the industry self-adjusts – it may not be something that publishers can influence.
But publishers may be able to influence the fact that lower level research is not well represented away from the publishing institution.
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Publisher strategies Elsevier
Has partnered with several leading domestic publishers Has hired a well-connected Chairman (Shan Mei) for Reed
Elsevier China operations to help raise profile and enhance connections amongst policy makers
Blackwell and Thomson are taking a more traditional sales approach – partnering on the ground, institution by institution
Two tier problem: The top 35 universities and research institutions in China
can afford content from Western publishers. But the 2nd tier do not have budget reasons and publishers
are working on building packages targeted at this group. Other than CALIS and the Chinese Academy of Sciences
there are perceived to be only a few small consortia in the market.
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Information flow and developing countries
Cost of reaching developing countries prohibitive for many European and US publishers
Negative effect on local publishers
Pressure on publishers to make content available through Creative Commons Developing Countries licenses
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Information flow and developing countries
Lingua franca becoming English? German used to be the international
language of Chemistry, but now chemistry articles generally need to be published in English.
Multiple language content will continue for a long time to come.
There is therefore great pressure on abstraction and indexing systems – which need to get better.
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Challenges for information professionals in developing
countries
Pressure of local influence – the object of publishing internationally may be to give a local institution a greater standing
Keeping track of what has been published in multiple languages
Exchange publishing – informal, dual culture exists
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Beneath the radar
Journals
BooksNews Press releases
Audio content
Blogs Exchange journals
Grey data
There is still plenty of content that is outside ‘traditional publishing channels’ and therefore
may be beneath the radar
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Technology: China
Again, two tier: China’s technology infrastructure for the top
layers of its universities and institutes is world-class - faster than in the US.
But internet speed of access is still very slow in many parts of China.
The number of broadband subscribers in China is growing at 79% annually, and will reach 79 million in 2007
10m active blogs expected by end of 2006
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Mobile platformsNumber of mobile phone subscribers (millions)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
China
India
US
Source: Research and Markets, Outsell, EPS
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Access to scholarly communications in China
National Library of China digital portal (opened Sept 2005) 37 Chinese-language data banks 77 foreign language data banks 16,000+ periodicals in both Chinese and
foreign languages Special resources including local records,
Dunhuang documents, periodicals of the Republic of China (1912-1949) and doctoral dissertation and master's thesis, all purchased or established by the national library
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Technology: India
Indian Book publishing industry reported to be growing rapidly
Estimated to be around 1m blogs – but 23 mainstream languages!
Technical innovation enabling user-collaboration: eg www.zoho.com
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Library tools
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Thank you for listening
Questions?Thoughts?
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