Market
The WSC will be primarily based online, its main idea drafted from existing open source communities such as WikiPedia, a web based, free content encyclopaedia that is openly edited and freely readable. The WikiPedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 50 million hits a day and containing approximately 1,3 million articles,
However, the WSC differs from WikiPedia in a number of important ways. First, whereas WikiPedia is a non-profit organisation, the WSC is a privately held 4th sector company, creating profit from advertisement and other sources of revenue, yet serving a public purpose and working closely with government and other international bodies.
Second, the WSC focuses on collaboration with existing online journals, magazines and bookstores, creating links to existing sites rather than competing with current publishing structures. The WSC can afford to do this because of the originality of its idea. On the other hand, the WikiPedia encyclopaedia is in direct competition with other providers of the same service.
Third, WikiPedia has currently no system in place for rating the quality of its products, while the WSC will provide its users with peer-to-peer and user-product rating system (similar to ebay), thereby addressing quality of content issues.
Fourth, WikiPedia is an encyclopaedia, and as such will not receive day-to-day contact with most users. The WSC web on the other hand is primarily a research tool, and as such will be used daily by students and staff in universities, laboratories, and other places where one is dependent on in-depth overviews of science.
To get an idea of the potential scale of the WSC, consider that there are currently approximate 1 billion students world wide, 88,2 million of which are involved in tertiary education, approximately 7,24 million research and development personnel world wide, and that the world expenditure on research and development in 2000 was 755 billion US dollars .
If we consider also that Google Ads pay 0,4 US dollars per click, even a relatively small portion of the worlds scientific personnel visiting the site would draw a significant revenue, which can only increase when taking into account that independent advertisers pay a lot more than 0,4 USD per click.
The closest the WSC may get to a competitor is SCOPUS , the worlds largest scientific database containing 14 000 scientific titles plus 167 million scientific web pages. It has the largest collection of abstracts ever collected online in one place, going back forty years. SCOPUS is subscription based, but this may change as open science initiatives such as the Creative Commons grow increasingly prominent . In any event, the WSC does not view itself to be in direct competition with SCOPUS. Rather, the two are mutually beneficial to each other, with overviews in the WSC linking references to SCOPUS articles.