Table of Contents
-
-
This document is designed to provide higher education leaders with an analysis of the leading commercial players strategies in this domain, the implications of those strategies, and a preliminary set of possible broad stroke strategies that higher education institutions might consider taking to secure outcomes consistent with their own values and goals.
-
Elsevier, Pearson and Cengage in particular are transforming themselves into data analytics companies built atop their content, effectively adding ways to monetize it.
-
The paradox of the STM publishing industry is that it has very high visibility over its revenues in the next two to three years (because of multi-year contracts) and very little beyond this time frame.
-
We see three major threats to Elsevier’s performance going forward and have laid them out below in what we estimate to be declining order of likelihood.
-
Springer Nature Group is the single largest publisher of scholarly journals, with about 3,000 titles.
-
Wiley is the smaller of the three main journal publishers. It publishes about 2,300 journals, so – in terms of titles – it is very close in size to Elsevier.
-
Clarivate is the name the new private equity owners (Onex and Baring Asia) gave to the assets previously owned by Thomson Reuters when they acquired them in 2016 (but management had already decided to sell it by 2015).
-
-
The continued decline of the higher education courseware business in the U.S. is driven by the interplay of three factors; student enrollment, pricing, and participation rates.
-
Compiling a map of all the products and services that the three leading research data analytics vendors (Clarivate, Digital Science, Elsevier) market outside libraries is inherently a best effort exercise
-
At its core, the company aims at participating in education sectors that it expects to transition to full digital delivery of content and services, enabling itself to add value to content through data analytics.
-
-
Cengage is a pioneer in inclusive access and Cengage Unlimited, its full catalog subscription, was the first full offering of this kind. Cengage was also the first major publisher to offer a product branded as open educational resources (OER), although the content is still purchased by students enrolled in a course.
-
Cengage is a pioneer in inclusive access and Cengage Unlimited, its full catalog subscription, was the first full offering of this kind. Cengage was also the first major publisher to offer a product branded as open educational resources (OER), although the content is still purchased by students enrolled in a course.
-
Anecdotal evidence suggests that these systems built and maintained by publishers capture massive amounts of data about student and faculty behavior that go beyond what is necessary for accomplishing their core objectives (i.e. improving student outcomes). Institutions, faculty and students should think about the accumulation and use of data collected and retained by schools and commercial vendors.
-
Actively formulating and implementing solutions to these problems is complex but critically important, and something SPARC intends to work closely with the community on. However, we think it is worthwhile to conclude this document with a recap of some of the options for action currently available to the academic community.