Ingenta's Information Commerce System: an independent analysis

The recent delivery and acceptance of our first Information Commerce software prompted considerable interest in this area of our business from the media, from analysts within the industry and, of course, from several of our publisher clients. Here we reproduce an independent review of ICS, prepared by information industry analysts EPS.

Ingenta: from content to concepts

The renaissance at Ingenta continues, with some recent partnering and expansion announcements underpinned by development work in ICS, Ingenta's information commerce system that now enables publishers to take a much more flexible approach to licensing their online material.

by Dan Penny, Analyst

For a long time revivals have been rare in the publishing sector. But Ingenta, which a few years ago had been struggling with declining revenues, is now rejuvenated and has a strong sense of purpose. In particular, it is Ingenta's technology investments in market-sensitive areas that are turning things around at the content aggregator. For proof, one needs only look at its current plans, which do not seem like the actions of an organisation in retreat. These include employing a representative in China, providing Chinese support materials, partnering with Google Scholar's Library Links program, and updating Ingenta Connect to provide the opportunity for publishers to sell advertising space around their content. It will be interesting to see how much this is adopted, but what publisher would not feel that it was right to at least experiment with advertising models, as the use of peer-to-peer communication and repositories that bypass the publisher start to become the reality for the more organised members of the research community?

Ingenta's Information Commerce System (ICS) is not a new concept but is now market ready - and the Institute of Physics is the launch software customer. The new version offers greater flexibility in enabling publishers to easily offer different sorts of products to their customers, and to re-package their content to offer new sales models. Ingenta suggests that this is a sea-change in the way publishers offer digital content - it talks about enabling publishers to move away from offering content, and to start producing 'concepts'. So what does this mean?

The ICS platform works by labelling a publisher's content - digital articles, books, proceedings, blogs, anything - as 'Resources', and labels individuals, institutions, consortia and member groups in the marketplace as 'Identities'. It then allows publishers to create 'Products' by simply combining a subset of Resources with a License Definition (to govern the rules of access) and Price. Products can then be targeted at subsets of Identities. For example, a publisher might create a product that consisted of all of its books and journals relating to Cardiology, and make that Cardiology product available to York University through pay-per-view, to the European Society of Cardiologists for permanent access, and to attendees at Valencia's Computers in Cardiology Conference as an online preview that was limited to 10 minutes' access - enough time for them to judge the quality of the content and to sign up for a subscription.

Ingenta's ICS doesn't need to replace existing infrastructure as it can work through existing interfaces like statistics packages, Customer Relationship Management and Content Management systems. Integral to the flexibility of ICS is that every Identity and Resource inside the system can be allocated parent and child relationships to other Identities or Resources around them, so that in the example above, if a member of York University became a member of the European Society of Cardiologists, they would automatically be upgraded to receive permanent access to the journal in question. Meanwhile, the advantage to librarians is that they may purchase innovative subscriptions on behalf of their institutions.

Recent years have seen this sort of subscription management system being developed by all of the larger STM publishers, typically as relatively large bespoke projects. The middle tier of publishers therefore comes under pressure to provide something similar. As well as potentially offering a substantial saving to the larger publishers, a software product, such as ICS, also offers an affordable solution to this middle tier; implementing and customising Ingenta's solution, rather than building their own as some of the market leaders have done. Implementing ICS could therefore be a defensive measure for publishers - but it also grants them freedom to experiment, as it allows the product creation process to be much quicker - a single technical implementation allows future business models to be developed by business teams without IT departments lengthening the process.

This is healthy. For too long, digital content has been offered under the same business models as paper content, and greater experimentation will create a more sophisticated and efficient information market. ICS offers opportunities for publishers to rethink, test and evolve new information commerce models. Meanwhile, Ingenta itself is well placed between the two groups, publishers and information professionals, who may not lack the creativity, but do lack the resources to manage their digital content.

The challenge to Ingenta may be in keeping the balance right between offering flexibility to its many publisher partners - the degree of potential variation in what each publisher wants to be able to offer is vast - and ensuring that each implementation of ICS is quick and straightforward.

© Electronic Publishing Services (EPS)

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EPS is an Outsell, Inc. company. For organisations who need to understand and respond to the constant challenges of the publishing industry, EPS is the authority providing informed market intelligence and trusted, confidential advice and consultancy. EPS enables its clients to manage risk and to make better business decisions, strengthening their performance in the industry. For more information, visit www.epsltd.com.