London, Day 3, June 20, 2007

First of all, I have to make one very important announcement: I have to learn to shorten my posts, or the blog will be longer than the trip.
Having said that, allow me to make one comment about the weather: it's absolutely perfect. It rains just enough so that one can still say, I was in London, and of course it rained every day. Technically, it's true that it has rained every day, but it's just the slightest drizzle, it cleanses the air, and then some Turner-esque sky comes into bloom and it's glorious. There are so many trees, with such wonderful heads of leaves, and it's often windy. I mean, what is more beautiful than the wind in the willows? Well, they may not all be willows, but you get the idea.

Today was our second day of lectures. If I may be permitted to make a comment, I think six lectures a day is a bit much. In the end I have a bit of trouble keeping them separate in my mind. I expect this will become easier as we go along. After all, I don't know much about e-publishing. I know it's important, that it is a force in the field of scholarship, research and librarianship, and that in some respects it may be the way of the future. Enough, in other words, that it is important that I learn more about it. But for now I am experiencing a slight overload of the brain. A lot of information is being delivered, and we don't have much time to mull it over, to digest it, to come up with really interesting questions.
I have a feeling that this will soon change, though, so for now I'll leave it at that.

We had four lectures over the course of the morning:

The first two were delivered by Liz Chapman, the deputy libriarian of the entire UCL campus. During the first lecture she described the structure of the UCL libraries (there are close to 20 different sites, scattered around London, wherever any kind of UCL facility is present), the budget, the main administrative and logistical issues the library system has to address on a regular basis, and so forth.

Food for thought:

• Just as in American universities, the libraries contribute greatly both in the teaching and research functions of UCL.
• The e-part of the libraries is very helpful. The professors can put their reading lists online, students can discover what is expected of them and then search library catalogues.
• Students appreciate e-resources in part because of the fact that they are available all the time, whereas the libraries themselves close at a certain hour, and students want around-the-clock access.
• As far as issues that the libraries face, the are similar to the ones our American libraries face: staff professional development; getting the high-ups in the university to fork over more money for the budget; the limited hours due to staff/budgetary constraints, and so on...
• A lot of the money spent on buying materials for the libraries goes to e-resources, partly because of the so-called Big Deal, that forces the libraries to purchase large packages of journals, which are very expensive. This happens also in our American libraries.
  

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Ms. Chapman's second lecture focused more specifically on the library's relationship with e-journals, the e-journal interface and the problems inherent in the licensing and management of the e-journal budget.

Food for thought and interesting points made:

• The academics give the library lists of titles they're interested on, based on personal research-related interest, what competing institutions have, perhaps also on journals they themselves publish in;
• The library, on the other hand, bears in mind what journals are actually requested by the users (meaning more the student body), some of whom are of course the academics themselves, budgetary constraints, and what is bundled together in the bid deals;
• The big deals themselves are interesting to talk about, because they affect the way all libraries operate when it comes to serials: print vs. e-; a combination of print and e-; titles bundled together; expensive overall -- all this tending to exclude libraries with smaller budgets from many of the offerings;
• Another important point that was brought up was the predicament that libraries find themselves in: on the one hand there is the need for scholarly materials at a reasonable price, and on the other there are the publishers' policies, that make it very difficult for libraries to order e- only, and therefore delay indefinitely the time when it will be possible to switch away from print completely.

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During the second half of the morning there were two more lectures:

Nancy Buckley, an ex-director of journal sales for Blackwell, has now opened a consulting firm of her own, called Burgundy Information Services. In her presentation, she described what her new role is, as mediator between publishers and libraries, where she tries to obtain a good deal for both parties, representing 8 small publishers.

As a consultant, Nancy has positioned herself in a unique fashion to be able to work both sides of the negotiating table, as it were, in an equitable and ethical manner, in an attempt to forge deals between small publishers that may not have the clout or ability to put together "big deals" (or the desire, even) and libraries who don't have the budget to pay for them. I found her lecture very interesting: it opened many avenues of thought in terms of possible careers after graduation. The publishers are not the bad guys; after all, if it weren't for them we would not have the content. On the other hand, when they are banded together or when they aggregate many resources and sell subscriptions at prohibitive prices, they make it difficult for libraries to do business.
Nancy's solution offers a glimpse of a better way of doing business for both libraries and publishers.

The last lecture of the morning was delivered by the charmingly Scottish Alastair Dunning, who leads the digitisation programme at JISC. Alastair's presentation focused on the theme of digitisation of images as an act of publication in itself: digitisation as publishing.

Alastair Dunning and Dean Tula Giannini talk after his presentation (which was really great!)

Alastair spoke with great enthusiasm and energy about the various challenges inherent in the digitisation of images for the internet. His programme is involved in a series of projects that have as a collective goal that of putting English cultural heritage on the web -- in other words, there are a great many images to be scanned and made available online.

The points he touched upon were:

• The technical difficulty in deciding on what kind of scanners to use;
• The many different formats and resolutions for images;
• Issues of digital preservation and conservation;
• Issues of findability, retrieval, metadata, etc.
• Issues of copyright, rights clearing houses, etc.
• Websites produced by commercial and non-commercial entities;
• The need to partner with other institutions and capitalize on the skills and technology of the various participants;
• Format obsolescence and data migration plans;
• The need for skilled human beings who know how to make all the pieces fit together.

It was a very interesting and fun presentation. Alastair was knowledgeable, but also entertaining and charming. A great way to end the morning.

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After lunch, we all walked over to New Oxford Street, Prospect House to hear various presentations given by the good people at BioMed Central (BMC), the largest publisher of Open Access journals. This was really our first taste of Open Access, so I was very curious to find out about their business model.
To get to Prospect House, we walked through the British Museum, so we could get a glimpse of the old Reading Room (unfortunately closed until September, so we couldn't go inside) where the ghosts all the great English writers and scholars are still said to roam. Here are some photos of our walk:

This was my first view of the inside of the British Museum. I was intrigued by the way the inside facade looked like the outside of a building, and of course by the wonderful glass and iron roof/ceiling, which is spectacular.

A little further on, I just loved this roof.

Here we see the outside of the Reading Room. At the top it has these lovely windows, which reflect the roof above.

Another view of the strange inside/outside temple-like facade.

These steps lead to the top of the Reading Room, where there is a restaurant from which one can look down into it. If you want to eat there, prepare to spend a little more than usual, and you must make a reservation. We didn't go up there, because we were pressed for time. Oh, well, maybe on the weekend.

Where to begin on the BioMed Central presentations? Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to the Power Point presentations because as yet they have not sent them to SLAIS, so I'll just have to do my best to remember the salient points.

First of all, there were six of them, so I will just have to give a brief summary of each one. I'll try to remember what stood out for me.

These were our speakers and what they spoke about, or rather, what impressed me about what they said:

- Bryan Vickery: this gentleman gave us a little bit of an overview of Open Access publishing, where the model is Pay to Publish, Free to Read, as we have already seen. What is interesting is that more and more, open access publishers are moving away from having the individual authors pay (which would discriminate against those who cannot afford it) and moving more toward having the institutions they work for pay the publishing costs. This is something to think about.

- Melissa Norton spoke to us about the BMC series journals. They publish about 170 journals in total, and apparently this number is still growing. What I liked about her talk was that she explained to us that the criterion for publishing something is not based on what is trendy at the moment in the news (in terms of science), but is instead based exclusively on what is considered "sound science". I like this concept very much. She also illustrated the three kinds of peer review the journals use: open, traditional, and a choice of either.

- Stefan Busch talked to us about the independent journals. These journals have external editors, for whom BMC is a service provider, managing the flow of traffic between authors, peer reviewers and publisher (that is, BMC). All these journals are open access and have external editors.

- Michaela Torka spoke to us about the in-house journals. These journals operate under a modified model of open access. All the peer-reviewed articles are available immediately upon publication and for free. Then there is a large amount of additional information, like commentaries, reviews and reports, that is available on a subscription basis.

- Chris Leonard spoke to us about two new initiatives: Chemistry Central and PhysMaths Central. These two initiatives will emulate the model of BioMed Central in the areas of Chemistry and Physics. One feature I liked about these journals is that the formulae and equations are dynamic. The images of mathematical and chemical formulae are not treated as images; each symbol has been individually coded so as to be recognized for what it is by computers, making them useful tools and making the articles they appear in highly interactive.

- Maria Romano was the last speaker of the afternoon. She was my favorite because she is Italian, like me, and I am full of admiration for her English, which is excellent. Her presentation was different from the others, because she was actually talking to us about BMC's products for sale, not open access. Two very interesting products she discussed were F1000 Medicine and F1000 Biology (F1000 means Faculty of 1000). The field of Biology is divided into many sections and each section is subdivided into subfields, then eminent scientists from all over the world are invited to select the best most recent papers and articles in their particular specialties and give them a review and a rating. F1000 Medicine is similar in concept, although not identical. Subscribers to these services can customise their web interface and sign up for email alerts when new, highly rated articles in their field come out. These seem like excellent tools for busy researchers to stay on top of what is most current and cutting edge, without having to spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the material themselves.

That's it for today. I really have to shorten these posts. Tomorrow, Oxford all day, so it will be a day of mostly pictures and very little writing!

Good night and love to my family and friends.