How do you expand your publishing business and make more money? Most would not respond by giving away your product for free, but that’s just what Reed Elsevier is going to do. They’ve decided to go out on a limb and offer the latest articles and research from 100 of their top medical journals for free. Oncology by OncologyStat targets doctors and other practitioners to register to receive access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of content. Like other free web services, like Facebook or MySpace, they’re looking to survive and profit from advertising sold for the site as well as selling user information.
Why does this matter? It’s huge because it is shifting costs from the institutions and professionals that need that information to perform their critical work to the advertisers that want to sell them stuff. Furthermore, it’s an opportunity for others to get a hold of cutting edge research (if they can sift through the medical jargon).
Now you may be familiar with Elsevier, as we subscribe to ScienceDirect College Edition (
). You already have access to over four years worth of content from more than 1800 journals, which means you probably don’t need to sign up for the website.
original story reported in the New York Times
