The first speaker of the day was Dr. David Prosser, of SPARC Europe, whose talk was titled: The fourth driver of change -- Everything should be open. The acronym SPARC stands for Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, and the UK coalition was formed in 2002 after the success of SPARC US launched by the ARL.
The first half of David's presentation was devoted to outlining several "mission statements" of various international and national organizations: The Lisbon Agenda brought together the heads of the EU states in 2000, where they stated as their goal that of making the Eu the most competitive knowledge-driven economy by 2010 - the strategy to be employed was a transition to a knowledge-based economy. As for the UK, it was stated that "we want the UK to be a key knowledge hub in the global economy, with a reputation ... for turning that knowledge into new and profitable products and services."
He noted that with increased spending on R&D there arises a need for increased assessment of Educational Institutions, Researchers, etc; the need for more ways of measuring citation statistics, who is citing whom, and a desire to streamline this process.
At some point it became apparent that in order for scientific knowledge to progress, there must be a technologically advance way for scientists to share research, results, resources. There is a need for integration, federation, information analysis; the need to access and control remote experimental equipment. This is his definition of E-Science.
This is where Institutional Repositories come in. They will increasingly become part of the infrastructure that allows E-Science to take place across all boundaries.
In 2004, the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy agreed that "optimum international exchange of data... contributes decisively to the advancement of scientific research and innovation." The OECD actively began to promote Open Access, and declared their commitment to "openness, transparency and interoperability." As examples of successful collaboration across geographical, political and economic barriers, he cited the Genome Project, for which several research labs in different countries all shared data and the project was able to progress several times faster than it would have, and with probably better results, than if one country had gone it alone.
He also spoke about the MRC's Policy on Data Sharing and Preservation. The MRC believes firmly that the results of publicly funded research should be freely available to anyone, as they are sought and achieved for the common good.
In the traditional publishing setup, there is dissatisfaction at many levels. The authors are unhappy because their work is not sufficiently visible to their peers, and because they give away certain rights for publication, they themselves cannot dispose freely of their work. And then readers cannot access all the literature they need.
And here the call for Open Access comes in. As David defines it, Open Access is "the call for free, unrestricted access on the public internet to the literature that scholars give to the world without expectation of payment."
In the context of open access he mentioned the Budapest Open Access Initiative, based on the twin strategies of having scholars deposit their refereed journal articles in open archives and having open access journals charging no subscription or access fees.
He described institutional repositories, pointing out among the usual characteristics, the fact that they can function as full CVs for the researchers themselves. Then he talked about journals, both traditional and open access, and said that the difference between the two is the peer review (which we have seen is not strictly true, because there are many open access journals that are peer reviewed).
He went on to talk about the OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories), an authoritative directory of open access institutional repositories; strategies for making the transition from the traditional publishing model to the new open door model; the advantages of self-archiving (papers in OA repositories are cited on average twice as often as their counterparts); and of the Berlin Declaration in Support of Open Access, based on the premise that the mission of dissemination of knowledge is only half complete if access to information is not free for everyone.
This was a very dense presentation, and I encourage readers to follow the links.
The second speaker of the day was Geoffrey Bilder, of CrossRef. The topic of his presentation was The fifth driver of change -- The disruptive power of technological advance. Geoffrey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef. Over the past fifteen years, he has acquired experience in technology and how it can be used to support scholarly pursuits, whether they be teaching, researching or communicating among scholars. In the most recent past, before joining CrossRef, he consulted with publishers and librarians on how the emerging social software technologies may affect researchers and how best to use them so they can help in the field of scholarly and professional research. It's obvious that this has become the focus of his own research and work, and his presentation was fascinating. His speaking style was very engaging and I was not able to take many notes because I just wanted to listen and absorb as much as possible, not just of what he was saying, but of the implications of the things he was telling us about.
First he outlined the current situation of the Internet, by showing us the graph of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which describes how the hype around new technologies inflates expectations and encourages the early adopters to purchase them in droves. At the height of the curve is where the sales are high and it's too early for disappointment to have set in -- here, he made us laugh by telling us that this is where the new technology gets on the cover of Wired. Then comes disillusionment, where people discover that whatever the new gadget is, it does not open the doors of Nirvana. After that, comes the long tail, the slow re-adoption by the early adopters who stick with it, and finally there is a long gradual slope of adoption, and if the technology has something to offer it will plateau and become a commonly used item.
Next, Geoffrey outlined the situation among scholars and researchers today. In a nutshell, there is so much information out there that it's simply daunting. People don't want to read, and the more stuff is out there the less time there is to read each article or other piece of information they come across. Blogs of all types are having healthy lives, and apparently more than 120,000 blogs are created every day (I found this unbelievable -- I believe it, but it's a staggering number).
Then he went on to outline how the decline of publishers' value chain has led to the need for a new system of trust. This is the key issue in the world of publishing right now: Trust. What publishers have traditionally furnished is exactly that, trust. The editorial process guarantees that the output of official publishers has a seal of quality that researchers, scholars, students, teachers all rely on for the furthering of their own work.
Internet users are subject to all kinds of disturbances that diminish their trust in the resources they find: spam, viruses, etc. Geoffrey described the way the Internet currently functions as a "trust anti-pattern" which is touted as a non-hierarchical distribution of specialist or scholarly content, while in fact there are hierarchies in place just as there are in other more traditional publishing settings. When the hierarchies are lacking, the system breaks down into a chaotic jumble of information. So automated and human-driven regulatory systems are put in place to restore order, once again establishing a hierarchical structure. On the internet trust tends to build up horizontally, among peers, and at a local level. It is difficult for this kind of trust to scale upwards and outwards. Scholarly trust is handed down from above, as it were, and while it can be extended and become more global, it is also more subject to abuse.
So, how to avoid this trust anti-pattern? The more successful internet ventures on a global scale are the ones that have understood the need to implement trust-creating mechanisms. Geoffrey outlined the various methods that have been implemented by e-bay, Amazon, Google, Slashdot, where each has introduced ways in which content can be "rated" by various means, which allows higher quality content to gain trust while gradually pushing to the bottom content of inferior quality. On e-bay buyers rate sellers; in Amazon they created reviews; Google's method is invisible, but trust is measured in terms of numbers of links. If many people link to a site, it must mean that the site contains trustworthy material, so the site rises in the ranks and appears in search results in a more prominent position. Slashdot is a kind of blog that allows readers to post comments, and according to the kinds of things written, people gain more or less karma. These trust establishing mechanisms are called "trust metrics". Trust metrics are limited to the content of each of these sites, of course, so we have to ask ourselves how we can help to create an environment in which serious researchers and scholars can look for and find authoritative content.
Our role as publishers and distributors of scholarly content is to help researchers know what they should be paying attention to:
- Blogs: stm, scienceblogs...
- Wikis - not really a broadcast mechanism
- Social bookmarking/categorization
- RSS feeds
I found this part of his talk to be the most interesting, because it's proposing new ways of gathering and disseminating knowledge. I was particularly interested in a concept that he called "subscribing to a person's or a group's brain." Geoffrey himself has a blog, Louche Cannon (by his own admission he hasn't been very good at keeping it up, and I think the most recent post is from March of this year), and if you check it out you will see that he has this great little button that says "My Brain" on it. It is clickable, though it cannot yet interact automatically with browsers, so you cannot use it interactively the way it is intended to be used. It is an OPML file. The idea is to collect in one place one's website, delicious page, flickr page, connotea page, library thing page, citeulike page, and so forth. This way other people can share these resources. I am extremely interested in the social bookmarking/categorizing services like delicious and connotea and I plan to investigate all this further.
In Geoffrey's words, links are votes. The more people connect to a site, the more trustworthy it becomes. The implications of social software: the more high-trust specialists use them, the more they become... PUBLISHERS in their own right.
Geoffrey's theory is that the Internet should be used more and more as a database, and gave us a simple outline of what that database would look like: a grid of rows and columns, where rows are things, columns are attributes, and the nodes at the intersection between rows and columns are: things' attributes.
This talk was perhaps my favorite. I attribute this to a few things:
- I have been writing this blog and am therefore becoming keenly aware of the challenges, the implications, and the meaning of "user-generated content" on the internet;
- Geoffrey's manner was so lively and engaging that I really felt that this stuff on the internet was dynamic, capable of movement and change;
- Publishing interests me very much, and personal initiative also appeals to me.
The third speaker of the day, and the last before lunch, was Dr. Michael Jubb of Research Information Network. The topic of his presentation was : The sixth driver of change -- Changes in scholarly communication. Michael has held a variety of posts in settings both academic and official, and his resume is quite daunting. Most recently he held very lofty positions at the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), leading its transition to full Research Council status (now known as the AHRC). The RIN, which he joined as director in 2005, has as its goal to help researchers in all fields (STM as well as the humanities and arts) access research information, mainly in the UK. In his presentation Michael outlined how the RIN functions and in doing so also shed light on the way researchers are using and producing new information today.
The two core activities of the RIN are:
- to act as an observatory that analyzes two kinds of information: a) the trends in the world of information services for researchers in the UK, and b) how researchers are using these services, and what obstacles they face;
- to develop strategic advice and guidance to key stakeholders in the research world on ways to develop policy frameworks for information services that might be developed in the future.
In order to understand how this level of productivity can be maintained, it's necessary to study researchers' behavior as information users, and as creators of information and developments in scholarly communications.
Researchers as INFORMATION USERS:
- What to they want to find and use?
- What discovery services do they use?
The long tail of discovery services: in a graph Michael showed us 221 discovery services and sources, among which the most popular were Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, etc. But then there is a long tail of a huge number of highly specialized sources.
I liked hearing that library catalogs are heavily used by all branches of research, particularly arts and humanities.
What is the issue (and we have heard this over and over again throughout the course) is the gap between discovery and access.
What researchers want is to be able to transition seamlessly from the citation to the full text of the articles they want. A lot of research is conducted online, and researchers are often frustrated by subscription barriers that prevent them from accessing the full text.
What is also alarming is the lack of familiarity with Open Access content on the part of the researchers. Very few use OpenDOAR or other repositories, unless they stumble upon them by accident. Librarians are the most familiar, followed by the nature sciences researchers, trailed by the arts and humanities scholars. This picture makes sense if you consider that the life sciences researchers are the least likely to frequent the library. The increased amount of online research leads to their increased knowledge of resources that are open access. Libraries subscribe to many databases and full-text journals, so whoever conducts research at the library gets access to all these resources.
When asked which resources are the most useful to them, the answers were overwhelmingly in favor of e-journals (less so for the humanities).
Researchers as INFORMATION CREATORS.
Key outputs are journal articles and data.
There are concerns about data management (a deluge of information); about a lack of clarity as to roles and responsibilities.
Food for thought: He talked about Virtual Research Environments and Communities. Half of researchers and 75% of librarians think that they will revolutionize the field, while the other half of researchers have never heard of them.
Most UK researchers still publish with subscription-based journals, some with hybrids and the smallest number with free, open access journals. When asked whether their institution possessed a repository, most researchers did not know the answer, while most librarians did.
At the end of his talk, Michael summarized by going over what we need to know more about, in order to foster growth and healthy development in research. What we need to know more about: how researchers do their work; what resources they use; the differences in methods and means between different disciplines; and what's going on at the cutting edge, but also in the long tail.
At this point we had our lunch break and enjoyed a little timid sunshine in the garden outside the Garden Room where we had lunch.
The afternoon session began with a presentation by Martin Richardson, the managing director of Oxford Journals. His topic was: Overview -- where are mainstream journal publishers with new models? Martin has spent most of his professional life in academic publishing. Among other positions held at Oxford University Press, he has been the Director of the Oxford English Dictionary (I can hardly imagine anything more wonderful!). He is currently responsible for the publication of over 200 journals. I wish I could interview these people individually, because they're all full of surprises. In a previous incarnation, it seems that Marting edited books on chess (!!!) and also managed a bookshop.
In his presentation, Martin addressed the pros and cons of traditional, subscription-based journal publishing, as well as those of the open access model. But his real focus was on a hybrid model, which was very interesting. OUP has been conducting experiments whose goal is to discover whether Open Access journals will be more widely disseminated than subscription ones. Of course, a successful business model must be financially viable.
He used a specific journal to illustrate how they are transitioning from the traditional model to the new one: Nucleic Acids Research. This journal used to be subscription only, and therefore a large percentage of income was generated by the subscriptions. After the Open Access model was introduced as an option in 2005, almost 50% of the income is now coming from authors. There is a rate chart in the slides of the presentation, showing that there is a member rate, a non-member rate, there are waivers for developing countries and authors with financial difficulties. This model seems to be working.
Food for thought: the addition of open access content does not seem to have made the number of subscription sales decline in any significant way.
As far as the physical management of files goes, they have an Institutional Repository in which they store abstracts, metadata, bibliographic info, indexes, and url's that lead to the pdf of the full text. In other words, they do not store the articles themselves in the repository.
A project Martin mentioned is OUP's SHERPA project. I'm pretty sure this project has been mentioned before, but briefly: it is a partnership of 26 Higher Education institutions in the UK who have banded together to create open access institutional repositories. In addition to the functionality of the repositories I have outlined above, authors are also able to self-archive if they should so choose.
Martin's conclusion is that this hybrid model seems to be working. He also summed up by saying that the evolution of these new business model/s will depend largely on : technological developments and constraints, politics, research funders and library budgets.
Next up was Leo Walford of Sage Publishing. His talk was titled: Making journals more accessible. We don't know much about Leo's background, except that he is a leading journals marketer, which is all we need to know for the purpose of this talk. The best part about this talk was that it organized a coherent picture of the current relationship between libraries and publishers. Libraries are concerned mainly with giving their patrons maximum access to the best resources. Publishers are concerned with increasing or at least maintaining their revenue. So the question is: what are publishers doing to accommodate libraries, in other words, to increase access?
- The big deals
- licensing
- donation schemes
- pay per view
- new pricing/access models
- Open Access
Leo then went on to describe how each of these work. We have heard a lot about the big deal, so I won't describe it again, save to say that he too reaches the conclusion that the big deal is going to be sticking around for the foreseeable future, because it is too convenient for both publishers and libraries. In the context of licensing he talked about aggregators, who license large bundles of content and pay royalties to the publishers based on usage.
Donation schemes are interesting. Publishers have developed them as part of various projects aimed at providing access to journal literature to developing countries and other underfunded groups. This method of dissemination is a valuable publicity tool for publishers. There are different ways in which these schemes are implemented. Some recipients pay nothing, and others pay a token sum for their subscriptions. It's a win-win solution.
The pay-per-view is something we've already heard quite a bit about, but it's an interesting scheme, because it is akin to micropayments, and also aligns itself with the new way of thinking in smaller and smaller "bites" of information (chapters vs. books, etc.). Pay per view has shown promising signs of working quite well for publishers and libraries alike, though libraries always complain of the difficulty of budgeting in advance for things they can't foresee.
Libraries and funders, and to a degree also publishers, are looking for new payment schemes which might provide more flexibility, be cheaper overall, provide accountability and be simpler.
Some of the pricing models that are being considered are:
- national license
- pay per view converting to subscription
- core + peripheral pay per view
- value-based pricing
- Open Access
Pay per view conversion is something that seems apparently straightforward but that in practice has proved unwieldy and is not attractive to libraries or publishers.
Core + peripheral as a concept is a basic subscription with pay per view of content that is not purchased on subscription. This too is not very practical and leads to disagreements of what should or should not be considered "core".
Value-based pricing is supposed to be calculated on the basis of several parameters, like impact factors, number of downloads, number of articles published, and so forth. I'm not sure how this method is received.
Open Access is being offered more and more widely, and there are all kinds of hybrid offerings.
In conclusion, Leo doesn't see any major revolutions happening in the near future. All the new pricing methods are being adopted to some extent, but not in the widespread way one might expect. On the positive side, he does not seem to think that Open Access represents a serious threat to publishers.
The next speaker was Matthew Cockerill, of BioMed Central, and his talk was titled: New, emerging, and potential models. Matthew did not send Andy his PowerPoint presentation, so I can't provide a link to this talk, but I'll do my best to reconstruct from my notes. Matthew's background is really impressive. He cofounded BioMed Central in 1999 and is responsible for all aspects of their publishing activity. Before that he spent four years at BioMedNet, where he headed many important projects. He has a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Biochemistry.
Having spend an entire afternoon at BioMed Central, I was not expecting to hear anything particularly new from Matthew, and at first his quiet manner of speaking fooled me into thinking that his talk was going to be boring. But within minutes I was quite riveted. He has a quiet passion about him that indicates a firm belief in what he is doing. It's clear that he is driven in his desire to push Open Access journals to the forefront of the e-publishing industry.
He used one journal as an example, the Malaria Journal, ranked first in its field. He explained the pricing system: there is a Article Processing Charge (APC) - This APC can be paid for by the researchers themselves out of their grant money, but is increasingly being paid by their parent institutions or by grant-giving funders like the Wellcome Trust. Matthew used this example in order to examine the eternal question of financial viability for Open Access.
BioMed Central's financial model has been evolving over the years, with a varied pricing structure and they expect to break even this year. The more selective journals charge more for the APC, which reflects a greater editorial involvement and therefore higher production costs. By encouraging institutions to pay the APC, the authors themselves are free from financial constraints and can choose freely whether to publish in traditional, subscription-based journals or in Open Access journals.
Matthew says that the fact that they are on the way to breaking even is to be attributed to the fact that their processes are highly streamlined. This streamlining allows for quite a bit of flexibility. They are constantly adding new journals to their roster, and recently they have begun to add some entirely new ventures. An attractive publication he described to us is the Journal of Medical Case Reports. These are shorter articles, with a lower APC of only 250 pounds (as opposed to the usual 750-1500 pounds for other journals).
Matthew pointed out that there is a lot of valuable scientific knowledge (like that gained in clinical settings) that is not yet captured in formal publications. Journals like the Medical Case Reports can solve this problem in a way that is inexpensive while offering a lot of exposure. I found this part of the talk very interesting, because I think this line of publishing will have a very healthy future, with a lot of room for growth.
In closing, Matthew mentioned that Open Access and paid for content need not be mutually exclusive, pointing out that commissioned content (Genome Biology, Breast Cancer Research, etc.) can still be by subscription, while research articles should be Open Access (this aligns itself with those who pointed out that publicly funded research should be available to the public at large).
Then he mentioned Faculty of 1000 (which we heard about when we visited BioMed Central) - a subscription-based online literature awareness service built from the aggregated opinions of specialists.
At this point we all retired to the Garden Room for much needed tea and refreshments. And a short twenty minutes later, went back to Darwin Theatre for the last two speakers.
First up was Sue McKnight of Nottingham Trent University, where she is the Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources, serving three campuses and a total of 25,000 students. Prior to that she was in Australia, always in academic libraries, where she received awards for outstanding management skills. She has long been interested in pioneering e-learning and is a board member of various organizations, such as IFLA, JISC, SCONUL, etc. Her talk was titled: What models suit librarians?
Sue sent a questionnaire to the SCONUL Director's list with the following questions about e-journals from the point of view of the librarians:
- What you hate
- What you love
- What you would change if you could
On the love side, there is the general ease of access and use, and full text, which is much appreciated by all. There are good searching facilities. Everyone likes the use of DOIs.
As to what they would change: in a perfect world there would be little or no VAT, pricing models would be simple, there would be perpetual access to content that has been previously licensed; one sign-on would give access to all the journals; interfaces would be clean and intuitive; overlap between aggregators would be eliminated; access would be extended to associates of the libraries, walk-in readers, etc.; there would be more flexibility in changing titles in the package; federated searching would be simpler; -- and here is something I liked to hear -- there would be more art and design e-journals, with great image quality and everything online; there would be more competition among publishers; publishers would support developing countries with free access to knowledge and they would support Open Access.
While this talk did not shed light on any really new information, it was delivered briskly and engagingly, and as always, seeing things laid out clearly is always helpful.
At this point the publishers and presenters were invited to come down to the podium and have a panel discussion with the audience. Several publishers and librarians asked questions, and a few students as well. I didn't take notes for this, preferring to just listen to the debate and rest for a few minutes. There was only one speaker left, and he was supposed to be a big star...
Finally, we come to the last talk of the conference. The famous Richard Charkin came to address us in closing. I say famous because we had been hearing about him for days, and I have to say that it's a pity there was so much anticipation. Possibly because of the late hour, or because he thought we had heard too much already. Or possibly he simply didn't really prepare for this talk, I'm afraid this was somewhat of a letdown. Charkin is Chief Executive of Macmillan Publishers, and he has been involved in publishing since 1971. There is no doubt that he has a great deal of knowledge to impart, but today was not really that day. His talk was : Overview, Commentary and Insights. He spoke only briefly and rather sedately (we had been told that he was a real showman and I was really hoping for some theatrics). He told us a few entertaining anecdotes of his youthful days in publishing (stories along the lines of "the one that got away" -- along the lines of turning down Harry Potter).
The main points he wanted to get across were that we have to rediscover the reader and the writer, the real customers. The developing countries are the giants of tomorrow and that is where the market will be. We have to experiment, which costs money, but it's unavoidable. And publishers have to accept the fact that their margins will become lower.
Thus ended our extraordinary Conference!!!!!
By now it was about five o'clock in the afternoon, and we all repaired, once more, to the Garden Room, where we had celebratory champagne, took group photos, got certificates and graduate teddy bears, and Andy Dawson regaled us with a lusty rendition of The Bold Librarian (follow the link for the full text). A wonderful send-off, all in all.
Here is Andy taking a picture of the whole group. He had to do this at least ten times, since everyone wanted to give him their camera!
And here are De and Anthony, with the satisfied smiles of the just(ly rewarded with champagne)!
And here is dear Andy handing out our certificates of graduation from the first ever UCL Summer School in E-Publishing in partnership with Pratt SILS. Hurray for us!!!
And here, finally, is our group graduation picture. Anthony is in the last row, far right. Tula is right in front of him. Andy is in back, far left. Let's have a big hand for all of us!!!!! We did it guys! We really did it!
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On 29 June 2007, in London, two car bombs were discovered and disabled before they could be detonated. The first device was left near the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and the second was in Cockspur Street, in the same area of the city.
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pandreson
Buzz Marketing
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