GSE Research Limited is launching a new scholarly publishing business focused on research in corporate governance, sustainable business, environmental management, and science. The business aims to speed up the research publication process and foster more interaction between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. It will use new publishing technologies, encourage work-in-progress publication, and operate as a responsibly capitalist business that reinvests profits back into the field. The goal is to move beyond "parallel play" among these groups and better enable academic dialogue relevant to solving real-world problems.

1. GSE Research Limited
www.gseresearch.com

2. Born Digital: Building a strategy for
a new research publishing business
John Peters
Director, GSE Research
www.gseresearch.com

3. The Red Flag Act
Enacted 1865 Repealed 1896
“at least three persons to drive
or conduct a locomotive
[automobile]...one of such
persons shall precede such
locomotives on foot by not less
than sixty yards and shall carry a
red flag constantly displayed and
shall warn drivers and riders of
horses....”
www.gseresearch.com

4. Markets and technology in transition
• Protectionism sounds sensible at the time, but looks
foolish in hindsight
• Clayton Christensen – Innovators Dilemma - When New
Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. What makes a
company great, may kill it, in the face of disruptive
technology.
“If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster
horses.”
Henry Ford (possibly)
www.gseresearch.com

5. Survived……. Failed
“It is not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor the most
intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most
adaptable to change.”
www.gseresearch.com

6. Do the “rules” still work?
• exclusivity
• very high ‘rejection rates’
• rigour (particularly quantitative rigour)
• citation scoring
• speed to market
• Disintermediation
• user-created content
• social media
• peer evaluation
• Globalization
• Diversity
• socio-economic shuffling of the pack.
Evolutions or evolutions in flux, with their eventual outcome in many cases quite
uncertain.
www.gseresearch.com

7. “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to
belong to any club which would accept me as a
member”
• Quality?
• Exclusivity?
www.gseresearch.com

8. GSE Research: Born Digital
Research and practice ranging from corporate
governance and responsibility, through sustainable
business practice, to environmental management
and science.
www.gseresearch.com

9. GSE Research as a scholarly publisher
• GSE subject field is reasonably well-served in trade
publishing; less so in connecting scholarly research,
policy and practice.
• ‘Parallel play’, when young children play alongside
each other, rather than interacting together.
• GSE is too important a field for parallel play to be
taking place
• Researchers, policy-makers and practitioners need to
be playing with each other
• Properly-constructed scholarly publishing initiative
can help
www.gseresearch.com

10. Speed to market
• GSE is a field which needs speed to market.
• Research can often take two or three years (or more)
to complete and write up, and can take a further two
or three years to get through review and revision
cycles, and then wait to be published.
www.gseresearch.com

11. Disruptive technology
• GSE is a field where technology is creating chaotic
change.
• Self-published ‘non-traditional books’ have exploded
to more than 2 million a year (against 300,000
‘traditional’ books)
• Both Amazon and Apple have released free do-it-
yourself e-publishing apps for aspiring authors
• Expect more chaos!
www.gseresearch.com

12. People are ‘fed up’
• Scholarly publishing is a field where many authors
and academics are, to quote a correspondent, “fed
up” with traditional publishing approaches.
• What are considered to be
– excessive subscription fees
– excessive author processing charges
– slow and restrictive peer review
– slow time to market
all contribute to a supply chain which introduces value-
reduction rather than value-adding.
www.gseresearch.com

13. Walk the talk
• GSE is a field where you have to ‘walk the talk’.
• People have had enough of
– profiteering
– bad behaviour
– tax dodging
– deceit
– greed
• If people won’t accept it from banks or oil
companies, we certainly should not expect them to
from publishers and academics.
www.gseresearch.com

14. No more parallel play
• GSE is a field where people want to interact, play
together, and develop ideas.
• It’s a field where problems are real, knotty and cross-
disciplinary, and the need for solutions is pressing
www.gseresearch.com

15. Responsible capitalism
• We are aiming to run a responsibly capitalist
business
– fair but sustainable pricing
– profits don’t have to mean profiteering,
– we are as transparent as we can reasonably be
• We will publish our revenues annually
• We will give back 10% of revenues to community
good causes through the GSE Social Enterprise Fund
www.gseresearch.com

16. GSE: enabling academic dialogue in
the 21st century
The GSE platform has been developed in partnership
with Publishing Technology Pub2Web to encourage and
support discourse, and to bring the act of publication
into the centre of the research process, rather than
being the endpoint of it
– By encouraging researchers to publish work-in-
progress, blog posts, etc.
– Through the post-publication review facilities
– By inviting researchers to join the Research Exchange,
a social network to foster discussion, collaboration
and mutual encouragement
www.gseresearch.com

17. A final thought...
“When the fear of not
making a difference
outweighs the fear of
making a mistake....that's
when you can succeed”
Frank Gehry, October 2002
John.peters@gseresearch.com
www.gseresearch.com