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RSS feedsThe publisher’s director of strategy, Nick Fowler, told IWR that Elsevier’s experience of measuring journal and article usage would allow it to develop new services for academia.
Universities are now competing in a global marketplace to secure the best students. With British universities charging tuition fees of £3,000, a recent survey found that the number of UK students applying for US universities had increased by 64%.
“Funding bodies and institutions want to assess their own productivity and its quality,” Fowler said.
A key way to evaluate a university is to analyse its research output.
Until recently, universities and faculties have not had to look closely at the papers published by their own academics, but with European, US and Chinese universities hoovering up British and foreign students, output analysis is increasingly important.
“Institutional repositories are a sign of the need to collate and measure output,” Fowler said. “Publishers can help measure the output of an institution. It is a form of informatics we are familiar with.”
Fowler added that the technology developed by publishers to measure citations and journal usage could be used to measure the output of universities and offered to institutions as a service package.
With the publishing market currently experimenting with a wide variety of models, including open access journals and the adoption of institutional repositories, publishers could be looking for new areas to expand into.
“Not only will we be able to measure a university’s output, but we can integrate that information with our content and information to fulfil the needs of the institution,” Fowler said.
According to Fowler, Elsevier’s strategy is to move towards a greater understanding of the information an institution has and how Elsevier can add to that information.
Fowler sees scientific research driving the need for informatics in academia. “Science is a long-term growth industry,” he said.
