OncologySTAT: Even Doctors Want Data to Run Free

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The Internet has spoiled all of us now. Digital data seems to yearn to be free, and it naturally seems to depress the pricing of everything. Now, even high-priced medical journal information has found its way outside the subscriptions wall. Elsevier recently took the unprecedented move of bringing articles from over 100 of its peer-reviewed journals into a free portal for cancer specialists. For the price of registration, doctors get into ONCOLOGYSTAT.COM and get current articles from the very publications institutions are buying for a hefty fee. Only content from the last twelve months is available, and users only access it via a search box.

A number of other Elsevier medical resources are gathered at this fully ad-supported site including cancer news feeds, the MEDLINE database of journal abstracts and chemotherapy regiments.

All of this is information that hospitals and schools pay thousands for each year, and Elsevier SVP and publisher, OncologySTAT, Monique Fayad, admits that the model is entirely new. "It is breaking out of the traditional magazine model and creating a unique online entity that aggregates all the high value content and brings it together," she says.

And giving it away. One rarely sees this level of proprietary content out in the open, but Fayad is not worried that it cannibalizes Elsevier's fee-based model. "They are paying for it elsewhere but for a different purpose," she says.

Subscribers want to own the content and be able to browse the full library issue by issue. By limiting the content to the most current and using a search box only to find it, the non-paying user does not have access to the valuable archive or to the experience of seeing the full issue. She says it is targeted at the clinical oncologists, many of whom do not have institutional libraries at their disposal. "Academicians will always keep subscriptions to well-used journals because they need that full access, and browsing is part of the discovery process," she says.

For others, however, Elsevier was missing an opportunity to monetize their audience in a new way.

Even doctors are looking for free material on their field, and like everyone else they start at Google.

"They end up at Medscape," says Fayad. Medscape also aggregates journal information for free and sells advertising to pharmaceutical companies looking for this precious medical target.

"Medscape makes a lot of money off of pharma," says Fayad, and Elsevier is hoping to monetize its prize content by structuring it in a way that maximizes traffic and protects the franchises. "There is a big market online for health care professionals, but Elsevier didn't have an online product that was aggregating an audience to go after media buys. When you put up subscription walls there goes your whole media sales model," she says.

Apparently, even the high-end academic publishing field is starting to appropriate the logic of free digital media. You give away content on the front end and then find new ways of monetizing the audience elsewhere, goes the emerging theory of free. The free areas becomes ways of expanding the audience enough to make them worthwhile to advertisers. It also provides a marketing channel for other materials. Elsevier will use OncologySTAT to introduce cancer specialists to new titles like its Lancet Oncology book.

The digital genie is out of the bottle, Fayad contends. Providing users a "layer" of free content is de rigeur, an assumed part of a modern publishing strategy, even among rarified medical journals. "There are definitely fears," she admits. "But Elsevier is a publicly traded company. We need to respond to users. We want to remain a print-based company. We need to evolve. In sci-tech, this is an absolute must to do."

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