Elsevier Leads Medical Publishers
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Simba Information's Professional Content Report has released a half-year look at 2010 revenues for the Medical Publishing Market, and if flat is the new up, it seems that medical publishers are holding on just fine (http://digbig.com/5bchpq).

Overall, Simba placed the revenues for the top ten medical publishers for the first six months of the year at $2,211 million, up 3% from the same period in 2009. Elsevier tops the list, with a 3.4% revenue increase to $691.6 million for the half-year. Wolters Kluwer follows with $509.4 million in revenues, a 4.9% increase.

The next biggest slice of the pie is only half that size, with Thomson Reuters earning $230.8 million for the period. But their growth rate - 5.7% over 2009 same period - is the fastest of the bunch; PCR says Thomson Reuters credits the growth to its Medstat payer business.

Elsevier doesn't appear to be taking its market dominance for granted. On August 30th the company released news that it is rolling out SciVerse, "an innovative platform for accelerating Science" (http://www.info.sciverse.com/). The new platform is cloud-based, using ontology-based semantic tools, and was developed in conjunction with NextBio (http://www.nextbio.com). It's a smart strategy meant to capitalise on increased demand for search and workflow integration by content providers.

According to the company, SciVerse will include "SciVerse Hub beta, a module that integrates ScienceDirect, Scopus and targeted web content from Scirus, Elsevier’s science-specific Internet search engine. SciVerse Hub beta allows for a single search across its integrated content with results ranked by relevancy and without duplication, saving valuable researcher time." (A review of Scopus by Joanna Ptolomey was published in June 2009.) Users will have single sign on access to all three products.

Additionally, Elsevier will be releasing APIs for all the content on SciVerse and will offer application development tools on the site. Enabling customers to pull Elsevier's data directly into workflow applications should speed up the search and discovery process, helping to make customer more, not less, dependent on the content. Watch for SciVerse to start rolling out in Q4 2010.

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