Deuxième grille d’entretien

Future of Abstracting Indexing Database Industry

I-New market with new technology

• Dick Harrnigton, the CEO of Thomson Publishing said at International Online Information Meeting (2001) that in the information industry « Contents is no longer King , it’s technology »  Do you agree with him specially that the online information industry opens the door of opportunity to companies like IBM, Microsoft , Brtich Telecom that have not been perceived as online content forces ?
• End users want accurate information any time and everywhere they need it. Usage of nomadic technology is developing rapidly? Does your company tent to develop services for this kind of technology?
• Retrieval and search tools of “Good Information” are changing. Companies like Ovid, and Palm, offer services witch give information solutions with no longer need to traditional search service like enter a query, or doing Boolean search. Do you agree that search and retrieval is no longer centrepiece for online business ? how do you see the future of search engines?

II-Products and Services (e-learning, linking, standard, archiving)

• The development of a good e-learning environment that support seamless transition from college to universities, will be the key competitive advantages. Do you think that this kind of offer is strategic for your company?
• Users need to search across entire literature (abstract, text , images and audio information) not merely across single publisher’s output, but across different one’s contents. This needs developing standard formats . What will be the future standard format and what is the role of A&I players in developing it ?
• Linking between “electronic journals”, “abstracts and articles”, “articles and patents” and between articles and other multimedia materials, pose the following problems: who should be in control of the linking and how is going to set policies concerning the privacy or the contents that should be allowed to participate in the linking system. What ElsevierScience think about all these problems ?
• Digital materials archiving presents an organizational, legal, and economic problems. How could publisher be able to overcome these difficulties. Who should conduct the archiving process?: libraries , organization works on behalf of libraries ( OCLC) or publishers?

III-Competition and Partnership

• Public, non for profit organisation and academic initiatives in scholars publishing are increasing. PubMed Central, SPARC, Public Library of Science show the example. Commercials publishers are under the threaten of these initiatives? Do you agree with this ? Commercials publishing do need to offer new services? what kind of services?
• How do you see the competition between public and commercial players in the information industry?
• The survival in information market resides in partnership. Do you agree? with whom do you see your future partnership?
• There is a rumour about a fusion between Wolter-Kluwer et Reed-Elsevier? What would be the consequences in the information industry if this fusion occur?

IV-Business models

• There are different business models in the information market: subscription, per-review, license, free offer etc. Do think that information market will be able to hold up all these models in the next few years? or witch of these models will dominate?
• Authors have to pay for the publication of theirs articles at BioMed Centarl,? what do you think about this new business model? Will commercial publishers adopt this politic?

V- what will be:

• The value added in the information industry since five years were content offered by Web services; What do you think that the value added in the information industry will be in the next tow years?
• Who will be its players? Traditional on line vendors (like Dialog lexis-Nexis), Publishers (Elsevier) Intermediate (ingenta), telecommunication operators, or software vendors (Microsoft).
• A&I services are offered free of charge. What will be the commercial activities of A&I producers?