Mendeley has grown into a tool for organizing and reading publications, storing and sharing datasets, and connecting with potential collaborators and job opportunities.
Hivebench is an electronic laboratory notebook, used collaboratively by scientific researchers trying to design and organize experiments, share and protect data, and move findings along to patent or publication. ElsevierĮlsevier has been building up a rich array of research workflow products. One wry observer has suggested that “ workflow is the new content.” Two examples will help to illustrate the shift from content to workflows. As growth in the licensed content businesses begins to stall, sophisticated content providers have noticed that there may be both defensive value, as well as entirely new areas of growth, in supporting research workflows and university business processes. University business processes are another kind of workflow, and these include everything from the work of the library to acquire and provide content to the work of the research office to establish a research strategy and support researchers in securing grants from, and complying with the requirements of, funders. Researcher workflows focus on the individual or collaborative research process, including everything from undergraduate paper writing to the most leading edge laboratory research. They are sets of activities that can be understood as a process and to some degree systematized, and for my purposes they fall into two categories. Workflows are neither features, nor products, nor businesses. 1981–1975 B.C., Egyptian, Middle Kingdom, image via the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although they have different businesses and are pursuing different strategies, I would like to explore one element that they seem to have in common, which is an emphasis on workflow. Last week, I wrote about how these content providers, such as Elsevier and EBSCO, have worked to find an engine of growth beyond licensing content products to libraries.
Reflecting on the steady stream of investments being made by some of the most sophisticated content providers, I think we are well advised to examine their approaches under Joe’s framework. After all, if you could assemble enough features together, you might have a product, and if you gathered together enough of those products, pretty soon you might find yourself with a business. Two years ago, reflecting on the sale of Mendeley to Elsevier, Joe Esposito asked the question, “When Is a Feature a Product, and a Product a Business?” That question has nagged at me ever since. When is a Publisher not a Publisher? Cobbling Together the Pieces to Build a Workflow Business And, we may begin to ask whether these strategies are paying off - both for users and for the bottom line. Today, with all this greater evidence, our understanding of each of these portfolios, and others like them, can be far more nuanced. Since I published this piece, ProQuest’s Ex Libris acquired III and Clarivate acquired ProQuest and Kopernio Elsevier acquired bepress (which should have surprised no one), Aries, and Interfolio Wiley acquired Hindawi, Editorial Services Group, and Knowledge Unlatched and SAGE acquired LeanLibrary and Talis. And this evidence, of a profound turn to what I called “researcher workflow and business process businesses,” has continued to develop convincingly. My interest then, as now, was not in acquisitions for their own sake, but as critical evidence of the strategic directions of academic information businesses. More than five years ago, with this piece, I started writing in earnest about the new businesses that major publishers and information vendors were acquiring.
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