SCOPUS: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE JISC ANNOUNCEMENT
EPS INSIGHTS September 21 2005
by David Worlock, Chairman
The announcement this month of an agreement to bring Scopus into the UK's national procurement system for availability in all UK universities says a great deal about Elsevier's A&I research database, and a whole lot about the future direction of JISC, funded by the UK's Higher Education Funding Council.
Scopus now claims over 500 clients, but few of them can be as great as
JISC, which offers service access to the entire range of British further
and higher education, and is probably one of the world’s largest buying
networks. Its pattern of purchasing has in the past tended to favour
primary content, with a heavy emphasis in its early national site
licensing on journal collections in full text. However, it has a strong
record of purchasing other data types as well – the UK Ordnance Survey
mapping content might be an example – and in Scopus it has chosen a
service environment that gives accurate, structured access, through
tailored and controlled abstracting across a ten year history of 14,000
STM journals.
With Thomson’s ISI Web of Science service already
available, and Google Scholar at hand, university librarians and
researchers will have JANET (joint academic network) access to research
content which includes, for Scopus as much as anyone, the ability to
research content held in institutional or departmental, or even national,
repositories.
Elsevier’s Scirus search engine, and ScienceDirect itself,
are already fully available.
In this sense the announcement simply completes an ongoing process, and
was entirely to be expected. Critics of Scopus point out that it is
seldom priced separately, and often seems to be a part of a larger
package. Strategically that must fulfil Elsevier’s expectations: the
whole point of Scopus in one sense is to give the librarian/researcher an
Elsevier environment as a home base, to try to lock in the Scirus and
ScienceDirect environments in conjunction with it, and to assure users
that in building digital marketplaces Elsevier had not deserted their
critical requirement for high quality research tools.
Scopus works when
it helps make librarians look good. But the deal with JISC comes at a
time when JISC itself is busy launching its commercial information company
arm. By creating a wholly-owned trading company, the universities and
HEFC see the potential to leap out of the lockstep of annual budgeting,
and create an environment where margins can be carried forward and
re-invested. The point of this may be to lower the cost of acquisition,
but it may also be to create investment funds for the development of tools
for cross-searching and adding value to collections already licensed into
JISC through national site licence agreements. In other words, there is a
signal here that JISC may be becoming much more of a digital publisher in
future scenarios than ever before, and as a corporate body would be in a
position to create strategic alliances and joint ventures with secondary
service developers like Thomson and Elsevier.
Some primary publishers
will feel further marginalised by this process: others will feel that they
would rather the user community did it than their own commercial rivals.
In any event, the ability of all players in the value chain to add value,
and the ability of “users” to become “publishers” very quickly, remain
elements of the network would that are still insufficiently appreciated.
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