Who Knows About

the Future of

Medical Publishing?

Chris Graf

cgraf@wiley.com

27 January 2010

These guys know about the future

So do these guys

And these guys too...

But what do we know?

• Competition is fierce

• Competition is from new directions

• Communities still form around

interests

• And medics read more, and faster

Medics read more, faster

Work fieldArticles read

(per year)

Time spent

(hours)

Time per

article (min)

Univ. Med. ~322 118 22

Chemists ~276 198 43

Life

scientists~239 104 26

Physicists ~204 153 45

Soc

Sci/Psych~191 121 38

Engineers ~72 97 81

Source: Tenopir, User behavior across international and disciplinary boundaries

The future

• Things that are new

• Things that stay the same

So, what’s new?

• Interfaces

• Interactions

• Integration

• New models

Each taken

in turn, with

examples

and a few

comments

Interfaces

• Print Online

• Desktops Devices

Platforms Mobile apps

• PDF HTML

1957

2011

Mass Market Devices, Apps

Specialist Devices, Apps

Flat PDF

Functional HTML

Interactions

• Letters to the editor Comments, blogs

• Aggregate metrics Article metrics

• Readers Unique users

Comments

Article metrics

Metrics are cool.

But not all of them

are useful, or used

Like these on

http://realtime.springer.com

Cool, but are they useful?

Integration

• Of digital tools into editors workflows

• Of content and tools into research,

teaching, learning workflows

• Of content into practice, point of

care, and decision support tools

Tools for editors

This is a CrossCheck report on a presentation I gave about plagiarism with a 36% “similarity index”

For research

For teaching

http://www.youtube.com/user/IJCPeditorial

For learning

For point of care

And despite

rumours

to the

contrary

http://tmbot.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/sustainable-business-strategies-for-smes-in-a-dying-industry/

New models

• It all needs a business model

– Subscriptions, rental (reader, library pays)

– Open access (author, funder pays)

– Online advertising (sponsor pays)

– Others… versus… none at all?

Rental

Open accessTop research funders in PLoS One

Open access

BioMed Central

members globally

(from mid-2010)

Open access:

an ideology

more than a

business

model

0.05%

Authors paying to publish „open access‟ accounts for 0.05% of Elsevier‟s total revenues.

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/sponsoredarticles

Versus … No model

What stays the same?

What did I learn? To

listen more. And to walk

to the edge of my field,

lean over the fence, and

talk with the other

stubborn mules who live

next door.