Publishers going-it-alone (for now?) with GetFTR

Publishers going-it-alone (for now?) with GetFTR

In early December 2019, a group of publishers announced
Get-Full-Text-Research
, or GetFTR for short.
I read about this first in Roger Schonfeld’s »
Publishers Announce a Major New Service to Plug Leakage
» piece in
The Scholarly Kitchen
via Jeff Pooley’s
Twitter thread
and
blog post
.
Details about how this works are thin
, so I’m leaning heavily on Roger’s description.
I’m not as negative about this as Jeff, and I’m probably a little more opinionated than Roger.
This is an interesting move by publishers, and—as the title of this post suggests—I am critical of the publisher’s «go-it-alone» approach.
First, some disclosure might be in order.
My background has me thinking of this in the context of how it impacts libraries and library consortia.
For the past four years, I’ve been co-chair of the
NISO Information Discovery and Interchange topic committee
(and its predecessor, the «Discovery to Delivery» topic committee), so this is squarely in what I’ve been thinking about in the broader library-publisher professional space.
I also traced the early development of RA21 and more recently am volunteering on the SeamlessAccess Entity Category and Attribute Bundles Working Group; that’ll become more important a little further down this post.
I was nodding along with Roger’s narrative until I stopped short here:
The five major publishing houses that are the driving forces behind GetFTR are not pursuing this initiative through one of the major industry collaborative bodies. All five are leading members of the STM Association, NISO, ORCID, Crossref, and CHORUS, to name several major industry groups. But rather than working through one of these existing groups, the houses plan instead to launch a new legal entity.
While [Vice President of Product Strategy & Partnerships for Wiley Todd] Toler and [Senior Director, Technology Strategy & Partnerships for the American Chemical Society Ralph] Youngen were too politic to go deeply into the details of why this might be, it is clear that the leadership of the large houses have felt a major sense of mismatch between their business priorities on the one hand and the capabilities of these existing industry bodies. At recent industry events, publishing house CEOs have voiced extensive concerns about the lack of cooperation-driven innovation in the sector. For example,
Judy Verses from Wiley spoke to this issue in spring 2018
, and
several executives did so at Frankfurt this fall
. In both cases, long standing members of the scholarly publishing sector questioned if these executives perhaps did not realize the extensive collaborations driven through Crossref and ORCID, among others. It is now clear to me that the issue is not a lack of knowledge but rather a concern at the executive level about the perceived inability of existing collaborative vehicles to enable the new strategic directions that publishers feel they must pursue.
This is the publishers going-it…