Who Has All the Content?

Our contemporary media landscape is characterized by fragmentation. Every publisher seemingly has its own platform, and users must learn to navigate the idiosyncrasies of each. If you know how to read The New York Times in print, you won’t have very much trouble reading The Washington Post either, but if you try to use their mobile apps you’ll see that it’s as if they are in different industries. The tv guide and movie listings in your local newspaper once told what you could watch during the upcoming week, but to rely on streaming services today you’ll find it difficult to determine what is available where across the different main platforms, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix. In our sector, the digital transformation has been no less powerful, but fragmentation is no less problematic. Or is it?

Looking across the scholarly publishing sector, there are many delivery platforms, representing a diversity of models, such as ACS Publications, PLOS One, Project Muse, and ScienceDirect. In conducting their research, scholars and students find that the voyage from discovery to access can frequently be tortuous. The need to use multiple content platforms adds to their cognitive burden.

But in addition to these publisher platforms, fragmented though they are for content delivery to institutional customers, there are a number of services that gather up “all” of the content from across publishers. I will label them “comprehensive fulltext” services in this post. Comprehensive, because each of them is characterized by this as a serious objective, regardless of current degree of comprehensiveness. Fulltext, because each of them contains substantial actual content, not just metadata describing the content, regardless of whether they display or deliver this fulltext.

In this post, I explore the landscape of of "comprehensive fulltext" services. Please click here to read the complete post: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/02/23/who-has-all-content/