Whether fueled by a global arms race in research and development, the movement towards open research, or the mobilization against coronavirus — the number of research papers and associated data produced each year is exploding. By one estimate, the COVID-19 literature published from January 2020 to May 2020 reached more than 23,000 papers and is doubling every 20 days. The number of scholarly articles posted to the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing at 15% per year.
As this corpus of content and data grows and more of it is made open by research funder mandates, the value publishers provide will shift back toward discovery and integration — this according to the most recent report from Simba Information, a leader in media and publishing intelligence.
The report STM Online Services 2021-2025 focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2018 and 2021, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books.
Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty.
Many of the products and services are already considered “must have” information sold in multi-year, multi-million-dollar bundles.
The larger players will ultimately gain the most from this new opportunity. They have largely turned their attention to author and researcher engagement—a key point of differentiation and competition between publishers in the STM online services market.
STM Online Services 2021-2025 provides detailed market information for STM online services, segmented by: sci-tech standards, patents and online content, drug databases, clinical reference, training and certification, reference management and analytical tools, sci-tech abstracting and indexing, medical abstracting and indexing. It analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2025. The report includes an in-depth review of 10 leading scientific and technical publishers, including American Chemical Society, Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, IHS Markit, IBM Watson Health, Wolters Kluwer, and others.
