Springer Science+Business Merges with Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan Science Group

One could get dizzy trying to trace the M&A history of Springer Science+Business. I recall analyzing their likely future back when they were owned by two private equity companies, Cinven and Candover in the mid-2000s. Cinven & Candover had formed Springer Science + Business by merging Kluwer Academic Publishing with Springer in 2004. In late 2009, Cinven & Candover  sold Springer Science + Business to EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, for 2.3 B EUR (note, Springer held 2.2 B EUR of debt at the time).

In 2013, EQT sold Springer to BC Partners for 3.3 B EUR.

Today, it was announced that BC Partners will merge Springer with Holtzbrinck Publishing Group’s Macmillan Science Group (well, almost all of MSG). Holtzbrinck becomes majority investor with a 53% stake; BCP retains minority ownership. Derk Haank, the CEO of Springer, will become CEO of the combined company. Annette Thomas, current CEO of Macmillan, will serve as Chief Scientific Officer.

The combined entity will have 13,000 employees and annual sales of 1.5 B EUR ($1.7 B US).

The rationale for the merger centered on the need for market share in the scholarly publishing segment. Derk Haank is quoted as saying, “Together, we will be able to offer authors and contributors more publishing opportunities and institutional libraries and individual buyers will have more choice. The expected economies of scale will allow for additional investments in new product development.” 

Scale and market share are becoming increasingly important as large publishers, including Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley, along with Springer, are competing to acquire titles from scholarly societies and other small publishers. Having control over the high quality scientific and medical journal content allows the big publishers to reinforce the value of bundled access to their collective publications (as well as subsets of their publications). But, perhaps more important, by accumulating rights to a significant share of the journals that serve as the arbiters of quality research— and by association, quality scientific and medical evidence—these leading scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers will remain essential to any analytics engine that aims to mine the universe of important research results.

In brief, scale affords digital information businesses far more options in their choice of business models than would be available to a small publisher. Springer Science + Business now has Nature and its portfolio of journals in its camp. Together, they should be able to better compete in a segment that will continue to consolidate.

Big Data: Helping Scholarly Publishers Cut Through the Hype

Last week, I had the privilege of participating in an executive panel at the PSP Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Topics included semantic technology, mobile technology and models, big data, and user analytics.

My presentation on Big Data was added to Slideshare on Saturday and started trending on LinkedIn and Twitter almost immediately. Clearly, Big Data is a hot topic!  Furthermore, gaining a solid understanding of what Big Data means and what it means to your business is important to publishers of all sorts. This presentation was customized for scholarly publishers, including the top medical publishers, and provides some recommendations for  participating in the high-growth and quickly changing Big Data field.

J mc callumbig datapsp2013 from janicemc

Many thanks to Audrey Melkin from Atypon for inviting me to speak and for moderating the panel. I look forward to your feedback on the presentation and on continuing the conversation about developments in the field of Big Data and healthcare analytics.

Amplifying Your Content via Twitter

If I offered you a highly targeted opt-in list of potential customers and key opinion leaders who would promote the content in your publications, what would you be willing to pay per name in the list?  What if I told you there was no cost and furthermore, I’ll include metrics on who promoted your content along with a profile of that individual?  Sounds pretty interesting, right?  

This is one of the benefits of Twitter, as well as other social networks.  But, wait a minute, didn’t a report commissioned by Yahoo! just find that Twitter is a media platform and not a social network?  Well, some of the headlines I read made it sound that way, but the actual report, Who Says What to Whom on Twitter, confirms earlier research that found that “Twitter more closely resembled an information sharing network than a social network”.  That’s not the same as saying it’s not a social network.

Twitter is of course a social network: the platform is interactive and users decide whom to follow.  That’s enough to make it a social network.  Granted, Twitter differs from FaceBook in that following does not have to be reciprocal.  So, I may choose to follow the feed of a publication that interests me, say for example, @TheEconomist, but the Economist may not find value in following me.  In this respect, Twitter resembles a media platform, since a large part of the population uses Twitter to receive information, not publish information. 

It should be noted that a key finding of the Who Says What report is that infomediaries play an important role on Twitter. [The authors use the terms ‘intermediaries’ and ‘opinion leaders’, but I prefer infomediary.]  For example, I may chose not to follow @NYTimes because I know my friend @KentBottles will provide tweets that cover stories of interest to me from the Times.  Kent becomes the infomediary –or curator—for content from The New York Times for me. 

Okay, we’ve established that Twitter is a social networking and media platform.  Now consider that it is particularly well-suited for mobile and local applications. Let’s see, if I spell out the benefits and features I’ve mentioned above, we can say that Twitter is:

“a social local mobile real-time amplifier and audience building curation tool that offers detailed usage metrics and is available at no cost”.

So why have publishers been so slow to apply Twitter? The problem is that Twitter is many things to many people, which makes it very difficult to classify.  Trying to classify it as either a social network or media platform doesn’t make sense.  It’s both and more.  My advice to publishers is to focus on its amplification capabilities for existing content.  I recommend this podcast with David Meerman Scott, Ian Condry, Michael Bird and Gary Halliwell to get some other expert opinions on this topic.  And note that I commented on the podcast page, which NetProspex’s marketing team then posted as a separate blog and tweeted it.   Amplification, indeed!

Most of the Twitter presentations I see are targeted to marketers and advertisers, not publishers, and I’m considering preparing a seminar on the value of Twitter to healthcare and B2B publishers from my perspective as a consultant who focuses on effective business models for data producers/publishers. Please contact me to let me know if you would be interested.  If there’s enough interest, I’ll develop a seminar that can be presented onsite or offsite.