Trip Report: Elsevier Development Partners Meeting 2008

MPDL

Event: 1st Joint Elsevier Development Partner Program Symposium, 17-20 November 2008, Miami Beach

Participants MPDL: Inga

Summary: Since 2006, Elsevier invites Development Partners (DP) from academic and corporate institutions all around the world to discuss current activities and future strategies for the ScienceDirect interface. The aim of the DP program is to create a community of customers who will be integral to the continuing development of Elsevier products by consulting on new ideas and helping conduct user tests of new prototypes. This year, the 1st Joint DP Symposium brought together ScienceDirect and Scopus customers for the first time. The term "CONVERGENCE" has been used to describe the overall theme of the meeting: "We live in times of convergence... time of convergence that calls for an integrated perspective on the research and information challenges".

Elsevier seems to consider three approaches to respond to the new challenges:
 * 1) development of new tools in the area of "performance and planing" and "collaboration"
 * 2) implementation of a "next generation discovery tool"
 * 3) opening up the Elsevier space to externals, e.g. by providing access to APIs and by hosting an application marketplace to share customer contributions on Elsevier data.

Especially the last strategy sounds extremely thrilling, but in the course of the event it became more and more evident that this realignment is currently in the state of a "recommendation" and is not finally decided by the Elsevier management. The change won't happen overnight, but we as a customer shouldn't stop requesting open interfaces.

Documents:
 * Presentations expected to become available via the DP site
 * Wouter Gerritsma compiled a short blog post about the meeting, see http://wowter.net/2008/11/22/the-changing-face-of-elsevier-science/
 * Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpp_miami and http://www.pbase.com/hiero/miami

Elsevier - where are we today: high level strategy, Niels Weertman (Elsevier)
New mission statement: "Provide information and workflow solutions that help institutional decision-makers and researchers create significant value by building insights, enabling advancement in research, and improving research-driven returns-on-investment". This requires to extend the target groups, i.e.
 * traditional focus: librarians and researchers
 * expanding focus: managers, funding administrators, department heads (top executive level)

To identify potential areas of activities, Elsevier executed a market research and talked to about 1.800 librarians, researchers, decision makers, CEOs, etc. in a more broad manner, e.g. by asking "What are the problems you are facing in your daily work and how can we help you to do it?"

Result: a new more diverse set of challenges:
 * information proliferation (research becomes more inter- and multidisciplinary)
 * increasing need for collaboration
 * increasing competition for funding (e.g. number of grant applications raise, but funding budget on the same level?)
 * increasing focus on "performance & planing" - e.g. analyzing your research output and use this information for future activities

Overview on new tools:
 * 1) Identification of funding options -> Funding intelligence tool - to find all funding opportunities where you have success rate"
 * 2) Executing performance analysis. Note: Requirements regarding performance evaluations vary according to the position of the individual (researcher, manager, decision maker), e.g. use institute-wide information to plan future investments versus individual performance of an individual -> Research Performance Visualizer (prototype)
 * 3) * to help senior decision makers in institutions and governments to answer strategic questions about research performance and future directions be revealing previously hidden drivers of institutions' and nations' competitive positions and strengths
 * 4) * bases on Scopus data (clustering by using citations in a article based citation analyze, and co-author-ship?). visualization: science circle (two article sharing & reference leadership = number of citations you are receiving in a cluster/field, state of the art reference = are you cited in the most recently published ) => where does an institutions has it's scientific
 * 5) * number of publications (high productivity), position in the circle to distinguish specific inter-discipline articles from very specific
 * 6) * mapping competencies to market growth and share
 * 7) * showing top competitors associated with your strengths (to find somebody to hire)
 * 8) Serving collaborative needs: explore and understand new types of content and the ways in which users interact with it, e.g.
 * 9) * 2Collab = collaboration, including sharing scientific information
 * 10) * Expertizer = connecting researchers to experts, disciplines and institutes
 * 11) * Scopus = e.g. author profile to identify potential collaboration partners

Solution Areas (3 suites):
 * knowledge discovery (ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scirus) = quite comfortable area for Elsevier
 * researcher tools (2Collab, Expertizer) = first experiences gathered over the last years
 * performance and planing (Research Performance Visualizer) = quite far away from Elsevier core experience

Questions from the discussion:
 * how to identify "raising stars"? (corporate)
 * add further parameters to bibliometric analysis (e.g. memberships? patents? conference participation, speaking engagements, etc.?)

Elsevier - vision on Development Partner Program, Niels Weertman (Elsevier)

 * Elsevier wants to become more than a publisher and to expand its "relationship" outside the library
 * Discussions:
 * Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on content providing. Answer: new directions are not exclusively, they are complementing each other. In addition, Elsevier will need to improve their own data to
 * Access restrictions (because Elsevier is not the only publisher which would like to have access to decision makers)... ja, coordinated process is requested
 * It's not Elsevier, but the library which needs to be outside the library

User Center Design overview, Chris Jasek (Elsevier)
Creating "user personas" to remind that users are very multifaceted

New user group identified: "application builders" (=small subset of research community) - to serve their community, to create commercial solutions

Elsevier's LibraryConnect Pamphlet Number 5: "How to Design Library Web Sites to Maximize Usability" by Chris Jasek, see http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/0502/lcp050201.html

Subscription Fees: to be or not to be?, Nik Kopelev

 * each development needs to be paid by somebody
 * growing acceptance of electronic and satisfaction with electronic products (this changed
 * the people still haven't exhausted all functionalities
 * product enhancements: are more and more publisher
 * publishers expect new features/content increase the value of information products
 * customers expect these features/content (and still survive if they are not there). basic requirement: ease of use
 * subscription fees mutual liability

what can we do together. options to consider:
 * decrease financial pressure: modular approach to platform development & multiple purchase options 8same as for content)

working together with Elsevier to evaluate

counter stat as a mistake (because it's transactional ). we need another metrics that measures usage/importance but it's not predictable

modular business module, e.g. feature-free access to content...?

bringing articles to life...

ScienceDirect update, Niels Weertman (Elsevier)
Two directions to improve the ScienceDirect services:
 * 1) enhance and extend content (using Elsevier's own abstracting and indexing data)
 * 2) * partnering with text mining solution providers. Benefit
 * 3) ** deliver extra layers of meaning on the full text (-> automatically identifying
 * 4) ** provide new insights and avenues of discovery (-> hidden connections among topics)
 * 5) * way 1: pathway visualization. NLP engine extracts entities and relationships from full texts
 * 6) ** solution provided on ScienceDirect: "View Pathways from this paper". FEBS ?
 * 7) * tag clouds from life science and related data
 * 8) ** solution: tag cloud showing key terms "related terms" -> clicking on a term opens a topic page with links to results in sd
 * 9) next generation scientific discovery platform: Emerging trends in science and information industry demand a change:
 * 10) * openness, interoperability & integration, personalization, commoditization of content, collaboration and user contribution
 * 11) * question for elsevier: how do we use the assets available to us to deliver the tools and services users require in this changing environment. Concept:
 * 12) ** building an intelligent search platform (search multiple sites, including elsevier-based content, public internet and local content -> all data Elsevier can get hand on
 * 13) ** providing an open platform for elsevier business and 3rd parties to leverage the reach of their product (OPEN API)
 * 14) ** application marketplace to share customized views on data

Scopus update, Niels Weertman (Elsevier)

 * Green: Very few cancellations and many academic institutions signed up for a multi-year contract
 * Yellow: Scopus usage measures (i.e. total number of sessions) took off to a slow start, but are now catching up. On the other hand side it looks like users are coming to Scopus less frequently

Ideas4Science: Future of interfaces
From Elsevier's abstract: "We are exploring a new way of interacting with end users and customers: an online idea space where new invite researchers and librarians to form an online community where they can contribute, discuss and collaboratively prioritize ideas for new product developments and enhancements. The first pilot for this effort (idease4science.com) was launched in late October with a community of 40 users. They were presented with a set of 'challenges' around which to contribute and build their ideas using forum discussion and collaborative prioritization via a rating system."

Results: In this workshop, the first two teams collected ideas on future functionalities, while the last team could rate all ideas. The two highest ranked features have been:
 * 1) multi-language support (interface and full text translations)
 * 2) smart and simple search ("one box search")

Performance and Planning
From Elsevier's abstract: "As research is increasingly complex, interdisciplinary and competitive due to flattening funding levels, it becomes increasingly important for academic institutions and governments to evaluate their own research performance, set the right institutional research strategy and priorities and be able to optimize funding. In response to those trends, we are embarking on a program that aims to help researchers, research administrators and senior decision makers overcome the challenges around performance, planing and funding that they

hm... unklar, ob die bibliothek dabei eine rolle hat oder nicht, inga macht den "transparency" punkt. interessant: Sind die decision criteria for such a tool identical to databases (do you really need comprehensive data or is this ausgleichen?)

Collaboration
From Elsevier's abstract: "Following a brief overview of our newly formed Collaboration Tools group and an introduction to the expert finding concept we are working on, we will delve into the current state of researcher profiling, expert finding, and networking on your campuses. We will examine which of these needs our proposed solution is meeting and wheat work remains to be done."

results:
 * how to identify potential cooperation: important aspect, need to be work on
 * mandating of deposits into institutional repositories: Australia, Sweden, etc.

introduction to expertizer:
 * using Scopus APIs for mashing up data
 * "search for subject expert" -> returns "top ranked people" (e.g. regarding number of publications or received citations)
 * connection between scientists, e.g. how many shared publications
 * experimenting with visualization tools for scientist networks

Scirus API possibility for open access linking, Shin Kataoka
airway project http://airway.lib.hokudai. ???

preharvesting open access data form irs - openurl request - xml response for link window

linking service to open access

less than 20.000 articles

airway project phase 2: api model

search apis for doaj/oaister/scirus soap api

scientific commons http://en.scientificcommons.org (going to prepare an api) arrow discovery (not ready to implemente an api)

The use of Scopus in the Illinois Library Gateway, Bill Mischo
to check university illionois (dlf 2008 fall forum) use of scopus in the illinis, 70 targets) recommender system:
 * transaction logs: 2.3 million user search arguments, 2.5 million clickthroughs and all system actions
 * performs analysls of search arguments, pattern checksing
 * result display manipulation based on
 * links to the native interfaces at the point

search assistance technologies, including 40.4% follow-ups (selecting an option provided by the recommender system)

scopus api not used (due to performance), but screen scraping (hahaha)

Technology update, M'hamed El Aisati (Elsevier)
technology update:
 * mobile web - as a new trend
 * application
 * success stories: facebook, shareforge?, apple application store
 * success story key element:
 * openness (open the gates to customers)
 * audience (
 * money
 * plug-in models and contraints (for quick implementation
 * time to market (many applications can be designed and released in a matter of day)
 * metrics

deliver integrated workflow solutions for researchers and instittuional decision-makers taht improve research-driven teturns-on-investments

vision: read your incoming information/literature on your iPhone


 * sd e-books on kindle allowing advnace "reading" features


 * SOA vs. web application oriented architecture


 * what elsevier nees to do: SOA and application components architecure (e.g. citation tracker module mashup with facebook profile)


 * a place for integrating applications, content and more

are we on track for change - no, not in the next time

questions: - will subject specific database will have disappeared in 5-10 years? Niels: expects consolidation of databases, and those who survive will offer more than a google alike search option - google/googlescholar will be enough

470.000 user visits/month 1.200 customing institutions