Speaking of AI, here’s Lorcan Dempsey, proposing to group Elsevier, Digital Science and Clarivate as “scholarly communication service providers”:
In our space, it will be especially interesting to watch what I call the scholarly communication service providers, Elsevier, Digital Science and Clarivate. They each have scale with development capacity, a mature research graph (underlying Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science, respectively), a wide range of data, publishing and workflow services, as well as connections into scholarly and library communities. They have each made various announcements about AI development…
I’m not sure about the label itself—scholarly communication service providers may be misleadingly anodyne, and also too generic to distinguish the three companies from others. But the grouping itself (Elsevier, Digital Science, and Clarivate) does point to a pair of important shifts: (1) the “publisher” moniker is losing some of its relevance. Of the three companies, only Elsevier is really a publisher—and one that’s keen to stress that it’s much more. The (2) other point is that Elsevier, Digital Science, and Clarivate are each building out a full stack of competing services, up and down the research lifecycle—most of them built on scholars’ work and behavior. The upshot is that Elsevier may have more in common with Digital Science (Springer Nature’s corporate sibling) and Clarivate than, say, Taylor & Francis or Wiley.
Either way, Dempsey’s analysis of AI and the academy (with a library focus) is the sharpest I’ve read.