Bonne Anniversaire BRICS
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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10 years ago Jim O’Neil, an economist for Goldman Sachs, wrote a research paper that predicted the shift in global markets and coined the terms BRICS – to describe the world’s fastest growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

10 years on and interest in BRICS economies is still trending. I have just returned from the Online Conference and Exhibition event (#online11), and guess where vendors are reporting trends and opportunities for not only curating content but as content consumers – BRICS.

Scientific, technical and medical (STM) vendors were all tracking China in particular in terms of future developments to product lines and assimilating vast content silos. In particular I heard Thomson Reuters, ProQuest and Wolters Kluwer discuss these themes and are looking eastward. They sense an enthusiasm of contact and cooperation between China and the West.

There is an amazing opportunity in curating research content from China. Wolters Kluwer reports a two per cent growth in research papers from India and a massive nine per cent growth in China. However there are challenges in discoverability for researchers, information professionals and vendors themselves.

A ProQuest survey with CALIS (a national academic Chinese consortium) reports that only 14% of researchers had published in western academic journals. A further 42% of researchers wanted to get published (imagine that volume of content). But it is difficult. Apart from language barriers, help from mentors and finding out and accessing international conferences and events in order to meet peers is key.

Interestingly an increasing role for information professionals in Chinese academic institutions came out of the CALIS survey. A gap is identified for helping Chinese researchers communicate with the world beyond their walls. For example, workshops on finding and accessing conferences and any event that allows networking opportunities and communication tips for sharing academic content.

Apart from curating content from BRICS vendors face the challenge of penetrating markets fully in BRICS. That is in part due to multilingual challenges. Wolters Kluwer believes that this is a game changer in the STM market – to open up these markets fully and successfully you need to operate in a language other than English.

This month all of my LiveWire posts will be a roundup of current and emerging trends from Online Conference and Exhibition (#online11). In the world of information what have we been mainly talking about this year and where are opportunities for us moving forward – stay tuned.

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