NYTimes: Reed Elsevier’s Online Ads
Please see Ann Okerson’s liblicense email below about a new Elsevier access model for some of their medical publications.
I’d like to add some additional questions to Ann’s post: will it ever be worth a successful-with-lots-of-content publisher’s while to do something similar to target the spending habits of college students?
Just how will libraries help scholars be successful 10 years out from now? Perhaps by managing the output of higher education’s ”digital stuff ” with repository software, or something else completely different.
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Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 6:44 PMTo: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: NYTimes: Reed Elsevier’s Online Ads
Of possible interest and a model to watch. What happens to liblirary subscriptions? Will we need them? For whom, at what price, etc? Ann Okerson
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<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/business/media/10journal.html>September 10, 2007
A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads By MILT FREUDENHEIM
By some measures, the medical publishing world has met the advent of the Internet with a shrug, sticking to its time-honored revenue model of charging high subscription fees for specialized journals that often attract few, if any, advertisements.
But now Reed Elsevier, which publishes more than 400 medical and scientific journals, is trying an experiment that stands this model on its head. Over the weekend it introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and that plans to sell advertisements against the content.The new site asks oncologists to register their personal information. In exchange, it gives them immediate access to the latest cancer-related articles from Elsevier journals like The Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Prices for journals can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars a year.
Elsevier hopes to sign up 150,000 professional users within the next 12 months and to attract advertising and sponsorships, especially from pharmaceutical companies with cancer drugs to sell. The publisher also hopes to cash in on the site’s list of registered professionals, which it can sell to advertisers.
Mainstream publishers have wrestled for years with the question of how to charge for online content in a way that neither alienates potential readers nor cannibalizes their print properties. So far, few definitive answers have emerged. Reed Elsevier, which is based in London, is taking a risk that its readers will drop their paid subscriptions and switch allegiance to the new Web site, which will offer searches and full texts of the same content from the moment of publication.
“It’s a calculated risk, a bold step into the unknown,” said Dan Penny, a senior analyst in London at Outsell, a market research firm.
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Copyright 2007 The New York Times
