Media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information has released a report, STM Online Services 2016-2020, according to which, online services continue to be the fastest growing of all content delivery segments, faster than journals and much faster than books.
Before elimination of trading between publishers, STM online services are estimated to have grown 3.6% to $5.8 billion in 2016, and are expected to deliver a similar pace of growth annually to 2020.
The online services market is well positioned as it is comprised of electronic content and tools that scientific, technical and medical professionals rely on to conduct research quickly and accurately. The driving force for this market is to increase speed and productivity by imbedding information into a professional's workflow.
Growth rates for online services, which were sky high at the start of the decade have levelled off considerably, but are still growing faster than other STM publishing activities. Book and journal publishing have been the backbone of the industry, but those businesses are in transition due to the growth of the open access movement and challenges such as book piracy. Competitors see online services as a key to driving future growth.
Must have specialist databases like Inspec and PsycINFO have long driven this market. However, libraries and institutions buy multiple databases and their users are after answers regardless of their origin. Even the largest content owners Clarivate and Elsevier have responded by striking deals to add third-party content discoverable through a single search. Publishers large and small have benefited reaching a larger global market, but there are secondary effects. Platforms will be able to leverage not only their owners’ content and licensed content, but the growing body of data made open under funder mandates.
All of the top STM publishers—Clarivate Analytics, Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier—are well into a strategy focused on electronic media and workflow solutions. True online services are not derivatives of existing book and journal content. They are stand-alone services. Publishers have also begun adding user-generated content, such as blogs and wikis, as well as social networking capabilities.
STM Online Services 2016-2020 breaks the online services market into two categories—abstracting and indexing services (A&I) and online content. Simba provides market sizing for A&I and online content in both the scientific and technical and medical segments. These market slices are forecast to 2020. Competitor coverage includes: Clarivate Analytics, Wolters Kluwer, IHS Markit, Elsevier, American Chemical Society, EBSCO, Truven Healthcare Analytics, ProQuest, Hearst Health Network and Pearson.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
