Is it ethical to profit from information?

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President

GW Conference on Ethics & Publishing

June 2015

a) I’ve never taken a course on ethicsb) I’m a for profit publisher c) I’m not a journal publisher

WHO WE ARE

• Publishers of primary sources, streaming video and music

• 100+ people – offices in the US, UK, China, Malaysia and Australia

• Recognized by E-content magazine as one of 100 companies that

“matter most to the digital economy”

Some of our publications

Is it ethical to make a profit on information?

Why ask?

“You are a dirty publisher. Making money from exploiting information is obscene”

Tenured Professor to me, Cambridge, June 2011

“Companies like CAS make $100m in profits…”Participant in DPLA meetings, Harvard, May 2012

“You can’t link to us because that’s making money off what we do. We can’t link to you because you sell your content”

Various comments

Open Access Advocates

Public money pays for research. Publishers sell the research back at outrageous prices to the very people that created it.

All information should be freely accessible

We have the right to profit from information as much and as we like and how we like

Publisher ArgumentIt costs money to make publications. We do it better than anyone else. We charge what the market will bear.

[Presentation Name] | April 15, 2023

Capitalism vs. Communism

[Presentation Name] | April 15, 2023

Protestant vs. Catholic

Road that leads nowhere

[Presentation Name] | April 15, 2023

Let’s focus instead on What’s practical?What can both sides agree on?

And see where it takes us…

6 key points

• One environment for all

• Governments give and governments take away

• ‘Information’ is not a commodity: Open access is not an absolute

• For profit commerce is always present in the information chain

• Customers almost always get what they want in the end

• Businesses follow money

One environment for all…

– SilverPlatter MEDLINE (>$10m in sales)– Royalties to the NLM (<$200k)– Seven other vendors also making $$$

– SilverPlatter ERIC ($1.5m in sales)– Royalties to Dept. of Education (<$100k)– Many other vendors

– SilverPlatter SEC Online– No royalties going back to the SEC

Electronic publishing in1990

– PubMed provides free access to the world– ERIC offered free to the world – SEC filings offered free to the world

– What’s happened to the vendors?

Wind forward to 2011

– Ovid and others continue to profit from public domain MEDLINE

– New entrants – SilverChair, Collexis…– SEC filings continue to sell – Bloomberg,

Yahoo and many new entrants– Aries Systems moved into publisher

services– CSC provides free access to all for ERIC

with a 5 year contract for $29m

Environment in 2011

Someone always tries to make a profit…

Digitization and Conversion

Hosting & Banking

CMS, Indexing and discovery

Infrastructure

Hardware

It’s Darwinian

The role of government

• Differs by country

• Difficult to predict

• Timing

• Hard for most of us to influence

• Cannot rely on it

5 April 1710

Need to add value to survive…

This is a commodity…

This is anything but a commodity

Information isn’t a commodity!

Black & White

Grayscale

24 bit color

48 bit color

100 dpi

600 dpi

JPG

TIFF

Citation

MARC Record

Dirty OCR

99.995% rekeying

Semantic Indexing

Thumbnails

100 dpi

Page

Collection

Letter

Facsimiles

Transcriptions

EAD Finding Aid

Repository

Mobile Web

TCP-IP

Adding more and more value…

Low Value High Value

Document ASCII Searchability

Low res. images

MARC record

High res PDF version

Video abstract

Promotion

Links to citationsAuthor links

Process integration

Cross-searching

Workflow tools

Usage statisticsCollaboration tools

Ability to comment

Underlying data availableDiscovery integration

Open

For fee

http://jeffsuderman.com/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute

If you try and stop profit making…you slow value added

Low Value High Value

Document ASCII Searchability

Low res. images

MARC record

High res PDF version

Video abstract

Promotion

Links to citationsAuthor links

Cross-searching

Workflow tools

Usage statisticsCollaboration tools

Ability to comment

Underlying data availableDiscovery integration

Open

Add more and more value…

Low Value High Value

Document ASCII Searchability

Low res. images

MARC record

High res PDF version

Video abstract

Promotion

Links to citationsAuthor links

Process integration

Cross-searching

Workflow tools

Usage statisticsCollaboration tools

Ability to comment

Underlying data availableDiscovery integration

Open

For fee

Be of the web

Music

NewspapersWebsites

Monographs

Primary Works

Journals

“You may not create links to any …page or file forming part of our website without our prior written permission."

http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/links-banned-2011/https://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/4199675334//

Malcolm Coles’ PostsSites that forbid you from linking to them

More and more ways to add value…

• More editorial value

• More functionality

• More comprehensive

• Semantically organized

• Customization to individuals

• Discipline, community value

• Web/network value

Mobile

Embeds

DiscoveryServices

MARC

SearchEngines

RDF ?

Inbound Links

The American Civil War Research Database

15 times faster to read than to watch…

30 minutes of news12 double spaced pages 5 minutes to read in depth2 minutes to scan read

Adding value to video

Long way to go…

Source: Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom, Gene Bellinger, Durval Castro, Anthony Mills. http://www.systems-thinking.org/

Who, What, When, Where?

Therefore

Why?

Customers get what customers want (in the long run)

Commercial Publisher Behavior

If free access became more profitable than restricted access they’d embrace it very quickly…

Highly predictable!

Sian Harris, Completing the information cycle, Research Information: June/July 2013

Read about Discoveries

Plan Experiments

Conduct Experiments

AnalyzeResults

ShareResults

PublishDiscoveries

Back to 1990…

• The Web fast opening up…

• Who were the candidates to make the big $$$$ in information?– Cambridge Scientific ?– Elsevier ?– Springer ?– America Online?

$ Bn.

Market Capitalization of Selected Companies2000-2015

$ 386Bn.

Summary

• All organizations operate in a Darwinian environment– Funding, Legislation, Investment, Technology, Lobbying,

Philosophy, Commerce, Non-profit• The technology is allowing us to serve customers far

better than ever before

• Free access is here to stay and will exert ever greater pressure on commercial companies to add value

• Commercial companies are here to stay and will have to find new ways to add value or they will cease to exist

[Presentation Name] | April 15, 2023

Thank you!Stephen Rhind-Tutt

rhindtutt@alexanderstreet.com