In The News

Excerpts from Knowledgespeak.com

Q: Please comment on Knovel’s virtual library and analysis tools designed for scientists and engineers. How do these services actually help in reducing the time spent on research and analysis?

A: Knovel has been referred to as “Bloomberg for engineers.” It saves users hundreds of hours of research time, annually, because users can call up critical information quickly, compare it to other sources, actually interact with the graphs, charts and tables of published and unpublished works, and inject them into their own work. The company aggregates high-value content from publishers and builds its own databases. The best way to fully understand is to use an example from one of our customers. One of the top 10 global engineering, consulting and construction companies specializing in infrastructure development in energy, water, information and government markets did the following analysis: They first conducted a 2-year analysis of five online sci-tech reference products and selected Knovel over the competition. Through internal test studies and feedback from engineering professionals that were involved in the trial they conclude the following:

 

19 Hours of time saved annually per employee
$37.00 Engineering professional hourly rate
$705.00 Individual productivity savings per year
2,000 Engineering professionals using Knovel
$1,418,000.00 ANNUAL SAVINGS FROM USING KNOVEL

 

These users no longer need to pull a book from the shelf, go to a library, search aimlessly on-line…rather they have a single point solution that delivers exactly the data they require to the point of need at the point in time they need it.

Q: Briefly highlight on how your patented database architecture helps to integrate the functionalities of a database with the look and feel of a book?

A: Knovel delivers pages (such formats are familiar to users) and marries them to relational databases within a structured indexing system - allowing an unlimited number of content sources to work together. This allows users the flexibility of navigating through a document page-by-page, as one would read a book, or to search, sort and manipulate pages, live tables, live graphs, images and easily drill down through complex data. Relational indexing allows users to search specifically across thousands of references in all forms (e.g. books, relational databases, trade literature) and return results that are tailored to their needs. Knovel is the first service to achieve the seamless integration of textual and database paradigms.

Q: How many publishers, content references and subject areas does your virtual library currently cover? What are your plans regarding scaling up Knovel’s virtual library to other subject areas and/or publishers?

A: We cover 45+ publishers, nearly 2000 “best-of-breed” content references, 25,000,000 database entries, and 19 subject areas. Our collection will increase by nearly 30% in 2008 and we will add, roughly, 5 new content providers. We are particularly focused in oil and gas, aerospace, and chemical manufacturing - as the vast majority of revenue comes from corporations.

Q: Many of Knovel’s science and engineering data tools are available for free. Can you please comment on the degree of success of your hybrid model which accommodates both paying customers and individual free accounts?

A: We offer a material amount of content for free, primarily in the academic market. All of the content we offer for free, which is generally high value chemical data, is owned by Knovel. We do this as a thank-you to academe in general as they have been tremendously supportive of Knovel and our strong growth. In fact, we provide free access to significant content to almost 1,000 institutions around the world and are pleased to provide access to any institution that would find chemical property information useful. Although, this approach is not entirely altruistic as the
graduates of these institutions become our end users in the future and it is our goal to have those graduates demanding to know “where’s my Knovel” when they land at their first job.

Q: To what extent do you consider that online information services like your virtual library will replace traditional publishers and their print versions? What do you think will be the balance between online and print versions, in say, 5 to 10 years?

A: I do not believe that services like Knovel will in any way replace publishers. We provide a high value distribution mechanism and channel. In fact, many of our publishing partners look to us to supplement and substitute for the declines in revenue that are inherent in today’s reference book business. In fast-paced global businesses it is nearly impossible to use books efficiently, but professionals need access to the data to do their work. More importantly, services like Knovel are not, solely, about providing a virtual library. Instead, Knovel is a service that makes our users work flow faster - therefore enhancing productivity - and, as you can see from the example above, corporations are prepared to value and pay for the service. We share some of this value benefit with our publishing partners and many have reported back to us that they generate revenue from customers that they previously did not, and they generate more revenue because the corporations value the overall productivity benefit of the service much higher than just the content itself.

Q: What will be the key opportunities and challenges for your company for 2008?

A: Our greatest challenge is to continue to grow our understanding of the end user and how we can rapidly improve how they do their daily work. We are making huge investments in gaining this knowledge and applying it to our product/service offering.

Excerpts from John Dupuis, Confessions of a Science Librarian at jdupuis.blogspot.com.

Welcome to the latest installment of my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around I’m interviewing Sasha Gurke, Sr. Vice President and Co-Founder, Knovel Corp. I’ve long been an fan of Knovel’s products and appreciated their business model. When I met Rick Spiegel, Director of Customer Relations, at the ASEE St. Lawrence Chapter conference a few weeks ago while he was demoing some Knovel products, I asked him if there was anyone in Knovel on the product development side that I could interview. Rick put me in touch with Sasha, for which I am grateful. Thanks to Rick for getting us in touch and thanks to Sasha for such a stimulating interview.

Q. Sasha, please tell us a little about yourself and your career path to this point.

A. I am a chemist by training but spent last 27 years of my career in technical information, first at Chemical Abstracts Service and then at Knovel and a predecessor company. After helping to found Knovel in 1999, I, as a VP of Product Development, was responsible for creation of Knovel’s award-winning product, including the website and the content. Since late 2006, my primary responsibilities shifted to Marketing and Editorial areas. I travel and present a lot now, bringing back feedback from the customers and keeping a hand on the pulse of the industry.

 

Q. Could you tell about the Knovel eBook products (present and in the pipeline) and your business model. And what exactly do you guys mean by “Knovelization?”

A. Knovel is an aggregator of STM reference works, including handbooks and databases, in 19 subject areas ranging from aerospace to oil and gas engineering and from chemistry to food science. We just added a new subject area, Earth Science, covering such topics as Geology, Geotechnical Engineering, Oceanography, and Petrology. Most of our content comes from well-known publishers such as Wiley and Elsevier, although some is developed internally and available exclusively on Knovel. We have an annual subscription model with concurrent user license. Customers can subscribe to the entire Knovel Library or special collections, including premium products and subject areas. We have 3 types of products: full text searchable e-books, databases and interactive e-books with live tables, graphs and equations. Databases and interactive e-books are field searchable and are very popular with our customers because they increase their productivity. They are our main differentiator in the marketplace. The process of making an ordinary e-book interactive and resulting product are unique to Knovel and we called it “Knovelization”.

 

Q. I’m sure you get this a lot, but what is the delay between a new edition of a print reference being released and its Knovelization?

A. It depends on the editorial priority and on our publishing partners. Some publishers wait up to 6 months before they make a title available to aggregators. It takes Knovel production folks about a month to load a title with high priority, e.g., those requested by our customers. Knovelized titles require 2-4 months to load because of the work involved.

 

Q. Do you have a lot of content that you have created rather than licensed? Is this an area that’s going to grow?

A. We have 18 titles that we either created ourselves or took a copyright-free publication (often old and out of print) and gave it a second life. Many of these titles are large databases and interactive. Some, such as Unit Converter, are free tools. Currently, we are significantly expanding Knovel Critical Tables. Content creation is going to be a growth area for Knovel in the future.

 

Q. Can you foresee a day when the print versions of the books you Knovelize will disappear completely and they will only exist in electronic format? And what will the next generation of Knovel products be like?

A. It is hard to imagine not having print versions, although, certainly, the trend is toward more content available either in both formats or in electronic format only. The latter is especially true for journals and databases. The next generation of Knovel products will have a more user-friendly interface and more robust search capabilities. We will continue to add value to our content knovelizing it and integrating it with 3rd party software tools and platforms. And, of course, we hope to enable our users to add their own content to Knovel, creating their own e-books from that content and selected content available on Knovel.

 

Q. I think that librarians probably see the value in these products fairly quickly. But faculty and corporate scientists and engineers can be difficult to reach sometimes, so has it been difficult to get uptake on that side of the equation? How do you market to those groups and convince them of the value of your product?

A. You are right, it has been a challenge getting to the end user and we are not alone in the industry with this experience. Our answer is increasing awareness and explaining the benefits of Knovel to end users via frequent training webinars, interactive demos, a newsletter, and viral marketing, e.g., social networks. We exhibit at many trade shows and work with professional societies such as ASME and AIChE to reach their membership by providing access to some content. An important part of it is integrating Knovel into the work flow. In academia, this is being accomplished by offering Knovel-based course exercises to faculty. In the corporate world, we have an individual user registration program that allows us to “touch” the end users, learn more about their needs and be more responsive and proactive. Excellent customer support also plays an important role.

 

Q. What have been some of the challenges so far?

A. The main challenges have been acquisition of certain high-value content, automation of content management for interactive products, search engine optimization, and uneven usage.

 

Q. What do you see as your main competition? Wikipedia and other free stuff on the Web or something else entirely?

A. Wikipedia is a great general reference source that lacks the depth required in the STM field. Our main competition are publishers themselves. Most STM publishers have e-book sites with full back lists and they are becoming more aggressive in pricing and marketing. With federated search becoming more widely adopted and expanding Google Book Search, it will be easier to search across different publishers bypassing aggregators.

 

Q. Where do you see the broad field of scientific and technical publishing going in the next 5 to 10 years?

A. The amount of STM literature will continue to grow unabated, especially in the electronic format. We will see more of it being published in the languages of developing countries such as China. More e-content will be available free, especially in the journal arena, via social networks and Wikipedia-type sites. DRM will become a non-issue. There will be more advertisement driven business models. Librarians will demand perpetual licenses to e-content. Workflow integration of STM content and software tools will become a reality. This is what my crystal ball is saying but it has a crack :)

 

Full posting can be found at http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2007/11/interview-with-sasha-gurke-sr-vice.html

What a great source of information you have all been in response to my question about an online Reference Book collection for science and engineering. Below is a summary of responses, in no particular order:

1)  Knovel: Overwhelmingly the top vote getter. High usage and the students like it.  The engineers love the interactive tools.

2)  CRC ENGnetBASE/CHEMnetBASE (with CCD): There was a mixed response on these collections. One respondent noted that the Civil Engineering collection was stronger in ENGnetBASE than in the Knovel collection but several respondents noted that the search interface was klunky and there seemed to be a 6-12 month delay between print publication and appearance in the netBASE. As an aside, CRC met recently and discussed the time lag issue. They are working on addressing this concern.

3)  Kirk Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (Wiley): Better for undergraduate chemistry and has great biotechnology. Great for chemical engineering students.

4)  Ulmmans: More industrially oriented. Great for chemical engineering students.

5)  ESDU: Very expensive and not much user demand in an academic environment

6)  AccessScience: New interface and content give it broad appeal.

7)  ASM Handbooks Online: Recommended by respondents and reasonably priced.

8)  Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (Wiley)

9)  Referex Engineering (Elsevier)

10)  Safari Tech Books Online: Mixed reviews. Some concern over pricing but most respondents said that their students liked the collection. There seems to be multiple subscription models.

11)  Landolt-Bornstein: Very expensive.

12)  Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Digital Library: Great collection.

13)  Merck Index

14)  CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics

Thanks everyone for all of the great feedback!

Cheers,
Cynthia Holt
Science and Engineering Librarian
The Gelman Library
George Washington University