Sunday: we are scheduled to fly at 4:00 p.m., but because of the terrorist threats and attacks here in England, security will be heightened, so we must leave early.
Our last breakfast in the dorm near ours, where we have been eating every day for two weeks, was very nice. The kitchen staff have been very friendly and have made us feel at home, customizing our eggs for us every day, requesting porridge on days when it was not scheduled. They all gave us a warm send-off.
Then back to the dorm to pack, and off to the tube (we've become quite expert at navigating the subway) to Heathrow. Because of the security issues, it took us over an hour just to get to the check-in counter, another hour to get through security, and another half hour to get to a second security that was just for our shoes. Why we couldn't do the shoes together with the belt buckles remains a mystery...
We had barely enough time to rush to the gate, run onto the plane and get settled before we were able to wait on the runway for an hour so that their paperwork and the effective number of passengers could be reconciled. It didn't really bother us. The plane was much more comfortable than the one we flew out on. De. and I decided that we like Virgin Atlantic very much and would definitely fly with them again. Their planes have names, I like that.
Just as the flight to London had been, this one was also completely uneventful, just the way we like them. Very smooth, no turbulence, nice flight attendants, a lot of entertainment choices, personalized for each passenger (another winning feature).
I read the entire book of 84 Charing Cross Road, and cried my eyes out. Very nice.
We arrived in New York right around dinner time and De's husband picked us up in the car. They drove me to my new house, where I slept for the very first time. Very strange, but at the same time strangely familiar and comfortable.
A few days have gone by now, and the house is more and more like a home. The ground floor is not yet finished, so I don't have a kitchen yet, but soon enough...
Stay tuned for my next posting, which will be the literature review on my topic of choice for my paper, which will be on user-generated e-published content (like this blog, for instance). I am still formulating exactly which angle to explore, but I expect that as I read current journal articles it will crystallize. Writing this blog has given me much food for thought, of course.
Until then, my dear friends and family, goodnight and much love to all.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
London, Day 14, June 30, 2007
Saturday, one final day of nothing but fun, and tomorrow, home again!
This was a great day, that De and I spent together by ourselves, with nothing on the agenda but what we truly wanted to do, slowly, taking out time and having fun.
First we had breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, as usual, and fortified ourselves for the walking to come. Then, finally, I got to do what I really, really wanted badly to do, which was head to Charing Cross Road and visit the bookstores, but mainly Murder One, the prime crime bookstore in London. I bought 17 books, and felt much better right away. All the aches and pains of two solid weeks of lectures just melted away, book by book. Ahhhhh, the satisfaction. Among the books I bought was the classic 84 Charing Cross Road, which I intend to start, at least, on the plane to New York tomorrow.
When we came out of the bookstore, we realized that there were several theaters on that street, as well as bookstores. We looked at the posters and decided to see if they had tickets for this evening for The Letter, a play based on a story by Somerset Maugham. They did, and we bought them. The play begins at eight, so we have to get going if we're going to get anything else done during the day.
After the bookstore, we decided to go to the Tate Britain. We took the tube for a little, then got off and started walking. It would have been a very pleasant walk were if not for the fact that it started pouring. This was the only time, really, that we got absolutely soaked to the underwear. I wouldn't have minded so much if we hadn't had so much rain for the whole two weeks, and also we then had to be inside an air conditioned museum in wet clothes. But we didn't let anything dampen our spirits. We pressed on, got to the Tate, took off our outer garments and had the coat check people hang them to dry, and proceeded to walk around the museum.
De, in her infinite wisdom and preparedness, had reserved lunch in the restaurant. We went first to see the Turner exhibition, which was really great. It was so nice to be able to walk around and enjoy something without having to take notes and write all about it. I will say only that we filled our eyes with beauty, read lots of captions, stood around, walked around, and just soaked it all up.
Then we headed to the restaurant and had a very nice and fairly light lunch. The best part, though, was yet to come. Those who know me know that I came to England with one very specific goal: to have a real English tea with scones and clotted cream and jam. Well, until today this supposedly simple pleasure had been denied me. But, the ever resourceful De had noticed that they served tea at the Tate.
So, after lunch we wandered around some more, saw some more art, and finally went back to the restaurant where the waitresses were kind enough to give me two scones instead of one, since I had come from so far away to enjoy this mid-afternoon treat. And what a treat it was!!! It was the tea of my dreams. Clotted cream, jam, delicious scones, and a nice pot of tea just for me, which they refilled as well! In a word, HEAVEN.
After the museum, we went back to the dorm to rest and freshen up briefly before heading out again to the theater. Back to Charing Cross Road we went, and watched an enjoyable performance of The Letter. A woman kills a man, her husband believes her implicitly when she tells him the victim had tried to rape her, an investigation and a trial ensue. She is acquitted. And only after it is all over, because of a letter with which she is blackmailed, does the whole sordid truth come to light. The man she killed was her lover for years, but had discarded her in favor of a Chinese woman who was (dare I say it?) OLDER than he!!! Well, as we all no, hell hath no fury... and so, his fate was sealed. The cuckolded husband, however, takes her back, and her penance is that she will be a good and faithful wife to the end, though still in love with the man she killed. A good yarn, all in all.
After the theater, back to the dorm and to bed. For tomorrow, we fly home, home to New York, where my new house awaits, and where I will sleep for the very first time!!!
To all my friends and loved ones, goodnight!
This was a great day, that De and I spent together by ourselves, with nothing on the agenda but what we truly wanted to do, slowly, taking out time and having fun.
First we had breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, as usual, and fortified ourselves for the walking to come. Then, finally, I got to do what I really, really wanted badly to do, which was head to Charing Cross Road and visit the bookstores, but mainly Murder One, the prime crime bookstore in London. I bought 17 books, and felt much better right away. All the aches and pains of two solid weeks of lectures just melted away, book by book. Ahhhhh, the satisfaction. Among the books I bought was the classic 84 Charing Cross Road, which I intend to start, at least, on the plane to New York tomorrow.
When we came out of the bookstore, we realized that there were several theaters on that street, as well as bookstores. We looked at the posters and decided to see if they had tickets for this evening for The Letter, a play based on a story by Somerset Maugham. They did, and we bought them. The play begins at eight, so we have to get going if we're going to get anything else done during the day.
After the bookstore, we decided to go to the Tate Britain. We took the tube for a little, then got off and started walking. It would have been a very pleasant walk were if not for the fact that it started pouring. This was the only time, really, that we got absolutely soaked to the underwear. I wouldn't have minded so much if we hadn't had so much rain for the whole two weeks, and also we then had to be inside an air conditioned museum in wet clothes. But we didn't let anything dampen our spirits. We pressed on, got to the Tate, took off our outer garments and had the coat check people hang them to dry, and proceeded to walk around the museum.
De, in her infinite wisdom and preparedness, had reserved lunch in the restaurant. We went first to see the Turner exhibition, which was really great. It was so nice to be able to walk around and enjoy something without having to take notes and write all about it. I will say only that we filled our eyes with beauty, read lots of captions, stood around, walked around, and just soaked it all up.
Then we headed to the restaurant and had a very nice and fairly light lunch. The best part, though, was yet to come. Those who know me know that I came to England with one very specific goal: to have a real English tea with scones and clotted cream and jam. Well, until today this supposedly simple pleasure had been denied me. But, the ever resourceful De had noticed that they served tea at the Tate.
So, after lunch we wandered around some more, saw some more art, and finally went back to the restaurant where the waitresses were kind enough to give me two scones instead of one, since I had come from so far away to enjoy this mid-afternoon treat. And what a treat it was!!! It was the tea of my dreams. Clotted cream, jam, delicious scones, and a nice pot of tea just for me, which they refilled as well! In a word, HEAVEN.
After the museum, we went back to the dorm to rest and freshen up briefly before heading out again to the theater. Back to Charing Cross Road we went, and watched an enjoyable performance of The Letter. A woman kills a man, her husband believes her implicitly when she tells him the victim had tried to rape her, an investigation and a trial ensue. She is acquitted. And only after it is all over, because of a letter with which she is blackmailed, does the whole sordid truth come to light. The man she killed was her lover for years, but had discarded her in favor of a Chinese woman who was (dare I say it?) OLDER than he!!! Well, as we all no, hell hath no fury... and so, his fate was sealed. The cuckolded husband, however, takes her back, and her penance is that she will be a good and faithful wife to the end, though still in love with the man she killed. A good yarn, all in all.
After the theater, back to the dorm and to bed. For tomorrow, we fly home, home to New York, where my new house awaits, and where I will sleep for the very first time!!!
To all my friends and loved ones, goodnight!
Monday, July 9, 2007
London, Day 13, June 29, 2007
Friday, the second day of the "1st Bloomsbury E-Publishing Conference". How lucky we are! It's the last day, the quality of the speakers is truly superior. We are going out with a bang, for sure. Yesterday the focus was on e-books, and today it was on e-journals.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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?
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:
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:
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!
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!
London, Day 12, June 28, 2007
Thursday: the first day of the "1st Bloomsbury E-publishing Conference". And what a conference! There are people here from Australia! From the States! From all over. They came here to talk to us, 20 puny little American students. How can we possibly deserve all this attention? I'm quite overwhelmed. And moved, really.
Well, let's get on with it.... :
First of all I would like to say thank you to Anthony Watkinson for organizing this conference and the entire summer program. It has been an unforgettable and invaluable experience. The quality of the speakers throughout has been outstanding, and as I said, the speakers at the conference promise to be absolutely top notch! Thank you also, of course, to Tula Giannini, our dean, who intuited that a partnership with UCL's publishing department could yield promising results. Well, I concur wholeheartedly.
Anthony conceived of this conference as an opportunity to bring together representatives of various facets of the publishing and e-publishing worlds, in order to highlight what he calls "the drivers of change". The conference as a whole will focus primarily on e-books and e-journals, since we are concerned mainly with scholarly publications. Each speaker has been asked to concentrate on business models, how they were, how they are, how they might and will be, with special attention to sustainability, reliability and effectiveness in the delivery of content.
Today, Thursday, the presentations will revolve mostly around the book, and tomorrow around the journal.
Most of the speakers have sent Andy (our wonderful technical and logistical coordinator) their presentations in PowerPoint form, so I will be able to include links for most of them.
I will try to be brief in my outline of each presentation and point out what made me pause and ponder.
For the first time at UCL, we moved from our classroom in the Henry Morley building to the Darwin Lecture Theatre, a largish amphitheater of a room with a podium at the front, very well suited to our purposes.
First up was Graham Taylor, of the Publishers Association. Graham gave us an Overview of the e-content scene. He spoke first of what he knows: namely that the big deal works for all concerned parties and he can't see it going away soon, since library budgets are pitifully small and about half of them are for acquisitions. He dispelled a myth that publishers want to limit access, and I can appreciate that. He told us that copyright law is not the enemy but a way to maintain order, and one interesting fact that I did not know is that copyright is responsible for 11% of the country's economy, more than TV and more than the movies. Very interesting. Then he spoke of what he does not know: namely how open access is going to work, who is going to pay for digital preservation over time, what students want, and what constitute fair dealing and fair use in digital media. He spoke about what concerns him: "good enough" is taking over, can Open Access be sustainable as a business model, self-archiving will probably lead to fewer subscriptions, the uncertain future of retailers, the Google plan to take over the world.
He also talked about what intrigues him: the possibility of "the iPod for reading" (he's seen something promising); the future of blogging and other user-generated e-content, what e-books are going to look like in the future (we ain't seen nothing yet); social networking.
All in all, a very interesting overview, and a good beginning.
Anthony and his collaborators have selected six drivers of change. The first speaker addressed the first of these:
David Nicholas, Centre for Publishing at University College London : The first driver of change - What the virtual user seems to want.
Dave had spoken to us at the very beginning of our class here, I think on the first day. The focus of his research in recent years has been very much the user. He believes that in most cases institutions, publishers, academics pay lip service to the user, but no one actually conducts sound scientific studies aimed at figuring out what it is, really and truly, that the user does when in an e-environment, and what he or she might be looking for, or might do upon finding something.
The user has how become a consumer, and that is the first driver of change. Scholarly communication has become a popular commodity, but the market is volatile and the only way to understand where it is going is by evaluating. But very few people are doing that. In this market, visibility is everything, and it is increasingly difficult to establish or even identify where authority lies. Search engines create a semblance of order, but often only exacerbate the problem of visibility vs. authority. Dave sees e-books as accelerators of change, with a potential market made up of students, scholars and the general public. He sees great potential in the virtual scholar environment. He reiterated the concept that the market is slow to respond to user needs, and that we need to move away from questionnaires, because people give inaccurate answers for many reasons, and look at what people actually do, using deep log analysis.
Libraries are in a tight spot, are perceived as being too large, too expensive, and not able to keep up with the times sufficiently. E-books could change that. Dave suggests that perhaps libraries should invest in "user observatories", and commented on the fact that as far as he knows there is not even one library that has one.
Publishers may have to face the fact that their "honeymoon" with libraries has come to an end, but they can bounce back by understanding and embracing the fact that the user/consumer is becoming more important than the author.
Users should be able to benefit from the large amount of information available, though there are real dangers of "dumbing down". Downloads cannot be considered a measurement of success, because people download and then don't read.
An interesting fact that he pointed out, in terms of analyzing usage of scholarly content sites, is that 45% of "visitors" to Oxford Scholarship Online are robots!
The third speaker was Richard Withey, from Independent News and Media PLC. His presentation was great for two reasons: 1. He comes from the world of paper publishing and had an interesting take on things, and; 2. He was the first and perhaps only speaker, really, in the two weeks we've been here, to incorporate significant multimedia in his presentation. We had not one but two videos. Fun! His talk was on The second driver of change -- Changing economics, lessons from another sector. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to this presentation, but I will do my best to summarize.
Richard too notes that consumers have simply taken the power for themselves. In the world of digital television and radio, for instance, there are many channels and many on-demand services, that allow consumers to choose what and when they will watch/listen. On this same topic, he mentioned two phenomena thought by the publishing industry to be dead, that have now returned to haunt us: personalization and disintermediation. "Personalization tends to force disintermediation," in his words. He dates the beginning of the end of old ways to 2004, when consumers first began to take control of communication.
The publishing industry has much to do to retain and regain the attention of the generation of 20-30-year-olds, who tend to read newspapers less and less. He spoke of the "Google generation" -- a term we heard a week ago from Ian Rowlands -- as those children born in or after 1993 who will never have known a world without the internet and Google. We have to be ready for these people when they reach newspaper-reading age. These people have an entirely new and different set of expectations.
One of the two videos he showed us is the Google video 2014 Epic, found on YouTube. It was entertaining and also gave us food for thought. Interesting that it's not about 2300, but about 2014, a very, very near future, underscoring the speed at which the world of information is changing.
The fourth and last speaker for the morning was Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust. His presentation was on The third driver of change -- He who pays the piper. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity organization in the UK and the second largest medical charity in the world. The tagline on their home page reads "The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health." They are incredibly wealthy and spend enormous amounts of money each year on research. What was most interesting about Robert's talk, however, was that it pointed out the fact that in recent years funding agencies like his have begun to focus not only on research that is being conducted, but on the dissemination of scholarship. This is a very significant shift in the policies of funders, and worthy of note. Robert is the head of e-strategy at the Wellcome Library. He has been involved mainly in devising strategies for the development and preservation of digital resources. His main focus of the past couple of years has gone into developing the Wellcome Trust's open access policy. He has succeeded in securing the cooperation of several other funding agencies, some of which are governmental, in the funding and development of UK PubMed Central. Two other interesting projects he has been involved in are: the digitization of the image holdings of the Wellcome Library, and a joint project with the JISC and the US National Library of Medicine to digitize a selection of historically significant medical journals.
Preservation is very important when talking about digital resources, and Robert has also initiated what is known as the UK Web Archiving Consortium. His talk focused on existing models of e-publishing, how they work, followed by an overview of the open access model, with particular attention to its sustainability and who pays for what.
This talk ended the morning of the first day of the conference. After lunch in the Garden Room, a very pleasant space overlooking a beautiful lawn, we assembled in the Darwin Theatre once again for the afternoon session. Because we were running a little late on the schedule, they decided to skip the panel on books that was scheduled to kick off the afternoon session, and go right on to the first presentation. Anthony had other commitments for the afternoon, so he left the chair for the afternoon session to Iain Stevenson, Professor of Publishing at UCL.
We had four speakers in the afternoon. Before we started, however, we had an introductory speech by Christoph Chesher of Taylor&Francis/Informa on how far we have come in the digital revolution. He spoke to us of the challenges of the many available formats. What platform should be used for digital output of books: XML? OEB? MS Reader? Mobipocket, PDF? He talked about what libraries want vs. what publishers offer, and where these can meet. One of the problems in libraries is always that of unlimited simultaneous usage of e-books vs. 1 pair of eyes at a time. He also mentioned the ongoing discussion of bibliographic identification of e-books: i.e. should we use ISBN's, DOI's (digital object identifiers). DOI's have the advantage of being "permanent" and unique. And he touched on Digital Rights Management and piracy. A good starting point for the afternoon talks.
The first speaker of the afternoon was Linda Bennett, an e-book consultant. Her talk was titled: Publisher business models. Linda mentioned that there is an increasing trend toward sales to individual users, and that they want to buy parts of books. The sale of chapters of books is increasing. This is something we heard about in one of the lectures during the course, and of course it raises many questions. If you sell a chapter by itself, do you write a short bibliography at the end of each chapter that refers only to that chapter? Do you write chapters so that they can be narrative wholes, in and of themselves, rather than a step in the narrative arc of a larger work? Should there be an alphabetized index at the end of each chapter? All these things need to be thought out and will generate much debate, I'm sure.
Librarians want e-books to be free or cheap. They also want simultaneous users and textbooks to be available. Some librarians prefer a single platform, which would justify the continued existence of aggregators.
Publishers, on the other hand, maintain that it costs as much to publish an e-book as it does a print book, that they should be compensated for multiple simultaneous uses and that high-demand books should cost more.
Aggregators allow librarians to have to deal with fewer intermediaries and enlarge publishers' client base by providing more routes to market.
The reality is that it is very rare that many users are reading one e-book at the same time, at least until now. Linda talked about the retail model and the various refinements that can be offered, like read only or single chapters. Then she spoke of various sales models to libraries, who can purchase single copies in perpetuity at prices similar to the print versions and pay a maintenance fee for the digital platform. She also talked about the subscription model, and about how some publishers allow simultaneous viewings and others don't.
Finally, she outlined the major characteristics of some aggregators (NetLibrary, MyiLibrary, Books24x7) and of some e-book publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, OUP, CUP, etc.).
The second speaker of the afternoon was Terry Bucknell of the University of Liverpool Libraries, who gave us A librarian's perspective on eBooks. Terry is the manager of electronic resources at the University of Liverpool, and manages a large portfolio of e-journals, databases and e-books in addition to a medium-sized amount of print subscriptions. He is part of the JISC E-Books Observatory Project, which I have already written about in this blog, and he is also Project Leader for the JISC ticTOCs project, which is just kicking off, and which will provide a personalizable webspace (similar to delicious or other similar tools) for scholars, in which they will be able to aggregate, organize and republish Tables of Contents (TOCs) from many different journals. His presentation was really a list of "demands" that librarians have of publishers. It was not uninteresting, because it always helps to hear things reiterated in an organized fashion, but none of the things he mentioned was new to us, after the two-week course.
The third and fourth speakers switched places due to scheduling conflicts, so the third presentation was given by Michael Holdsworth, now a consultant but formerly of Cambridge University Press. His presentation was on Amazon, Google & Windows Live. Michael is an expert on these three companies and his presentation's focus was on the programs and models they are employing in e-publishing, and the impact that they may have on traditional bookselling.
He is personally partial to Windows Live -- Live Search Books is better than Google in terms of search. He put the missions of the companies side by side and analyzed them:
Google - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Amazon (unofficial) - to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
Google has always said it would not sell anything. This is no longer strictly true, as they have just announced that they are going to start to commercialize their publisher content, with online access and a consumer e-subscription model. They will offer both rental and purchase.
Amazon has launched Amazon Upgrade, which is a pathbreaking new service. you get online access to the books you purchase in print. For 10-20% extra on the purchase price you get unlimited perpetual online access. There is talk about a "secret" Amazon e-book reader, but Amazon's online e-book reading platform is already very good, with highlighting, notes, shareable notes, sticky notes, etc.
Michael outlined the four conditions for e-books to succeed:
The last speaker of the day was Christopher Warnock, the CEO of Ebrary. The title of his talk was The eBrary vision: A case study. Christopher did not provide us with an online copy of his presentation, so I cannot provide you with a link, but I will do my best to summarize and if you follow the links I do provide you will easily be able to see what eBrary is all about.
In the future all information will be available to everyone online.
Interesting factoid: there are not enough trees in China to provide every Chinese citizen with a daily newspaper.
Initially eBrary produced a platform of e-content accessible through a proprietary reader. Today more than 85% or the world's commercially printed documents are printed from PostScript or PDF, while being authored through x/sgml. Ebrary builds software that builds full-text databases from PostScript, PDF and XML files that integrate with other, web-based electronic resources.
Christopher said that if they can add value to something that is perceived to have little or no value, they see that as a success. Their main goal was to create a client experience that added significantly to the user's experience.
They made InfoTools, an application that allows users to highlight any word or phrase and draw upon any reference work the library subscribes to, in addition to many web resources and any other specified catalog.
Another resource they have is eBop, a self-service e-book ordering platform that has some features in common with Amazon, like "others who ordered this also ordered...", but it also has other very useful features like the ability to check if the ordering library already has ordered this particular title.
As for generation of revenue, they have implemented microtransactions, and they seem to be working.
This ends our overview of the first day of our two-day conference.
Goodnight and love to all my friends and family, until tomorrow. :-)
Well, let's get on with it.... :
First of all I would like to say thank you to Anthony Watkinson for organizing this conference and the entire summer program. It has been an unforgettable and invaluable experience. The quality of the speakers throughout has been outstanding, and as I said, the speakers at the conference promise to be absolutely top notch! Thank you also, of course, to Tula Giannini, our dean, who intuited that a partnership with UCL's publishing department could yield promising results. Well, I concur wholeheartedly.
Anthony conceived of this conference as an opportunity to bring together representatives of various facets of the publishing and e-publishing worlds, in order to highlight what he calls "the drivers of change". The conference as a whole will focus primarily on e-books and e-journals, since we are concerned mainly with scholarly publications. Each speaker has been asked to concentrate on business models, how they were, how they are, how they might and will be, with special attention to sustainability, reliability and effectiveness in the delivery of content.
Today, Thursday, the presentations will revolve mostly around the book, and tomorrow around the journal.
Most of the speakers have sent Andy (our wonderful technical and logistical coordinator) their presentations in PowerPoint form, so I will be able to include links for most of them.
I will try to be brief in my outline of each presentation and point out what made me pause and ponder.
For the first time at UCL, we moved from our classroom in the Henry Morley building to the Darwin Lecture Theatre, a largish amphitheater of a room with a podium at the front, very well suited to our purposes.
First up was Graham Taylor, of the Publishers Association. Graham gave us an Overview of the e-content scene. He spoke first of what he knows: namely that the big deal works for all concerned parties and he can't see it going away soon, since library budgets are pitifully small and about half of them are for acquisitions. He dispelled a myth that publishers want to limit access, and I can appreciate that. He told us that copyright law is not the enemy but a way to maintain order, and one interesting fact that I did not know is that copyright is responsible for 11% of the country's economy, more than TV and more than the movies. Very interesting. Then he spoke of what he does not know: namely how open access is going to work, who is going to pay for digital preservation over time, what students want, and what constitute fair dealing and fair use in digital media. He spoke about what concerns him: "good enough" is taking over, can Open Access be sustainable as a business model, self-archiving will probably lead to fewer subscriptions, the uncertain future of retailers, the Google plan to take over the world.
He also talked about what intrigues him: the possibility of "the iPod for reading" (he's seen something promising); the future of blogging and other user-generated e-content, what e-books are going to look like in the future (we ain't seen nothing yet); social networking.
All in all, a very interesting overview, and a good beginning.
Anthony and his collaborators have selected six drivers of change. The first speaker addressed the first of these:
David Nicholas, Centre for Publishing at University College London : The first driver of change - What the virtual user seems to want.
Dave had spoken to us at the very beginning of our class here, I think on the first day. The focus of his research in recent years has been very much the user. He believes that in most cases institutions, publishers, academics pay lip service to the user, but no one actually conducts sound scientific studies aimed at figuring out what it is, really and truly, that the user does when in an e-environment, and what he or she might be looking for, or might do upon finding something.
The user has how become a consumer, and that is the first driver of change. Scholarly communication has become a popular commodity, but the market is volatile and the only way to understand where it is going is by evaluating. But very few people are doing that. In this market, visibility is everything, and it is increasingly difficult to establish or even identify where authority lies. Search engines create a semblance of order, but often only exacerbate the problem of visibility vs. authority. Dave sees e-books as accelerators of change, with a potential market made up of students, scholars and the general public. He sees great potential in the virtual scholar environment. He reiterated the concept that the market is slow to respond to user needs, and that we need to move away from questionnaires, because people give inaccurate answers for many reasons, and look at what people actually do, using deep log analysis.
Libraries are in a tight spot, are perceived as being too large, too expensive, and not able to keep up with the times sufficiently. E-books could change that. Dave suggests that perhaps libraries should invest in "user observatories", and commented on the fact that as far as he knows there is not even one library that has one.
Publishers may have to face the fact that their "honeymoon" with libraries has come to an end, but they can bounce back by understanding and embracing the fact that the user/consumer is becoming more important than the author.
Users should be able to benefit from the large amount of information available, though there are real dangers of "dumbing down". Downloads cannot be considered a measurement of success, because people download and then don't read.
An interesting fact that he pointed out, in terms of analyzing usage of scholarly content sites, is that 45% of "visitors" to Oxford Scholarship Online are robots!
The third speaker was Richard Withey, from Independent News and Media PLC. His presentation was great for two reasons: 1. He comes from the world of paper publishing and had an interesting take on things, and; 2. He was the first and perhaps only speaker, really, in the two weeks we've been here, to incorporate significant multimedia in his presentation. We had not one but two videos. Fun! His talk was on The second driver of change -- Changing economics, lessons from another sector. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to this presentation, but I will do my best to summarize.
Richard too notes that consumers have simply taken the power for themselves. In the world of digital television and radio, for instance, there are many channels and many on-demand services, that allow consumers to choose what and when they will watch/listen. On this same topic, he mentioned two phenomena thought by the publishing industry to be dead, that have now returned to haunt us: personalization and disintermediation. "Personalization tends to force disintermediation," in his words. He dates the beginning of the end of old ways to 2004, when consumers first began to take control of communication.
The publishing industry has much to do to retain and regain the attention of the generation of 20-30-year-olds, who tend to read newspapers less and less. He spoke of the "Google generation" -- a term we heard a week ago from Ian Rowlands -- as those children born in or after 1993 who will never have known a world without the internet and Google. We have to be ready for these people when they reach newspaper-reading age. These people have an entirely new and different set of expectations.
One of the two videos he showed us is the Google video 2014 Epic, found on YouTube. It was entertaining and also gave us food for thought. Interesting that it's not about 2300, but about 2014, a very, very near future, underscoring the speed at which the world of information is changing.
The fourth and last speaker for the morning was Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust. His presentation was on The third driver of change -- He who pays the piper. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity organization in the UK and the second largest medical charity in the world. The tagline on their home page reads "The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health." They are incredibly wealthy and spend enormous amounts of money each year on research. What was most interesting about Robert's talk, however, was that it pointed out the fact that in recent years funding agencies like his have begun to focus not only on research that is being conducted, but on the dissemination of scholarship. This is a very significant shift in the policies of funders, and worthy of note. Robert is the head of e-strategy at the Wellcome Library. He has been involved mainly in devising strategies for the development and preservation of digital resources. His main focus of the past couple of years has gone into developing the Wellcome Trust's open access policy. He has succeeded in securing the cooperation of several other funding agencies, some of which are governmental, in the funding and development of UK PubMed Central. Two other interesting projects he has been involved in are: the digitization of the image holdings of the Wellcome Library, and a joint project with the JISC and the US National Library of Medicine to digitize a selection of historically significant medical journals.
Preservation is very important when talking about digital resources, and Robert has also initiated what is known as the UK Web Archiving Consortium. His talk focused on existing models of e-publishing, how they work, followed by an overview of the open access model, with particular attention to its sustainability and who pays for what.
This talk ended the morning of the first day of the conference. After lunch in the Garden Room, a very pleasant space overlooking a beautiful lawn, we assembled in the Darwin Theatre once again for the afternoon session. Because we were running a little late on the schedule, they decided to skip the panel on books that was scheduled to kick off the afternoon session, and go right on to the first presentation. Anthony had other commitments for the afternoon, so he left the chair for the afternoon session to Iain Stevenson, Professor of Publishing at UCL.
We had four speakers in the afternoon. Before we started, however, we had an introductory speech by Christoph Chesher of Taylor&Francis/Informa on how far we have come in the digital revolution. He spoke to us of the challenges of the many available formats. What platform should be used for digital output of books: XML? OEB? MS Reader? Mobipocket, PDF? He talked about what libraries want vs. what publishers offer, and where these can meet. One of the problems in libraries is always that of unlimited simultaneous usage of e-books vs. 1 pair of eyes at a time. He also mentioned the ongoing discussion of bibliographic identification of e-books: i.e. should we use ISBN's, DOI's (digital object identifiers). DOI's have the advantage of being "permanent" and unique. And he touched on Digital Rights Management and piracy. A good starting point for the afternoon talks.
The first speaker of the afternoon was Linda Bennett, an e-book consultant. Her talk was titled: Publisher business models. Linda mentioned that there is an increasing trend toward sales to individual users, and that they want to buy parts of books. The sale of chapters of books is increasing. This is something we heard about in one of the lectures during the course, and of course it raises many questions. If you sell a chapter by itself, do you write a short bibliography at the end of each chapter that refers only to that chapter? Do you write chapters so that they can be narrative wholes, in and of themselves, rather than a step in the narrative arc of a larger work? Should there be an alphabetized index at the end of each chapter? All these things need to be thought out and will generate much debate, I'm sure.
Librarians want e-books to be free or cheap. They also want simultaneous users and textbooks to be available. Some librarians prefer a single platform, which would justify the continued existence of aggregators.
Publishers, on the other hand, maintain that it costs as much to publish an e-book as it does a print book, that they should be compensated for multiple simultaneous uses and that high-demand books should cost more.
Aggregators allow librarians to have to deal with fewer intermediaries and enlarge publishers' client base by providing more routes to market.
The reality is that it is very rare that many users are reading one e-book at the same time, at least until now. Linda talked about the retail model and the various refinements that can be offered, like read only or single chapters. Then she spoke of various sales models to libraries, who can purchase single copies in perpetuity at prices similar to the print versions and pay a maintenance fee for the digital platform. She also talked about the subscription model, and about how some publishers allow simultaneous viewings and others don't.
Finally, she outlined the major characteristics of some aggregators (NetLibrary, MyiLibrary, Books24x7) and of some e-book publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, OUP, CUP, etc.).
The second speaker of the afternoon was Terry Bucknell of the University of Liverpool Libraries, who gave us A librarian's perspective on eBooks. Terry is the manager of electronic resources at the University of Liverpool, and manages a large portfolio of e-journals, databases and e-books in addition to a medium-sized amount of print subscriptions. He is part of the JISC E-Books Observatory Project, which I have already written about in this blog, and he is also Project Leader for the JISC ticTOCs project, which is just kicking off, and which will provide a personalizable webspace (similar to delicious or other similar tools) for scholars, in which they will be able to aggregate, organize and republish Tables of Contents (TOCs) from many different journals. His presentation was really a list of "demands" that librarians have of publishers. It was not uninteresting, because it always helps to hear things reiterated in an organized fashion, but none of the things he mentioned was new to us, after the two-week course.
The third and fourth speakers switched places due to scheduling conflicts, so the third presentation was given by Michael Holdsworth, now a consultant but formerly of Cambridge University Press. His presentation was on Amazon, Google & Windows Live. Michael is an expert on these three companies and his presentation's focus was on the programs and models they are employing in e-publishing, and the impact that they may have on traditional bookselling.
He is personally partial to Windows Live -- Live Search Books is better than Google in terms of search. He put the missions of the companies side by side and analyzed them:
Google - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Amazon (unofficial) - to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
Google has always said it would not sell anything. This is no longer strictly true, as they have just announced that they are going to start to commercialize their publisher content, with online access and a consumer e-subscription model. They will offer both rental and purchase.
Amazon has launched Amazon Upgrade, which is a pathbreaking new service. you get online access to the books you purchase in print. For 10-20% extra on the purchase price you get unlimited perpetual online access. There is talk about a "secret" Amazon e-book reader, but Amazon's online e-book reading platform is already very good, with highlighting, notes, shareable notes, sticky notes, etc.
Michael outlined the four conditions for e-books to succeed:
- A good device
- Enough content
- Cheaper prices
- Easy DRM (digital rights management)
- What is online access really worth?
- What should Google's price model be?
- Will people, as publishers hope, be willing to pay more for more?
- Will Safari compete with Google?
- Will Google allow all eyeballs to go search on the publishers' sites?
- Will Google stay out of library and university supply?
The last speaker of the day was Christopher Warnock, the CEO of Ebrary. The title of his talk was The eBrary vision: A case study. Christopher did not provide us with an online copy of his presentation, so I cannot provide you with a link, but I will do my best to summarize and if you follow the links I do provide you will easily be able to see what eBrary is all about.
In the future all information will be available to everyone online.
Interesting factoid: there are not enough trees in China to provide every Chinese citizen with a daily newspaper.
Initially eBrary produced a platform of e-content accessible through a proprietary reader. Today more than 85% or the world's commercially printed documents are printed from PostScript or PDF, while being authored through x/sgml. Ebrary builds software that builds full-text databases from PostScript, PDF and XML files that integrate with other, web-based electronic resources.
Christopher said that if they can add value to something that is perceived to have little or no value, they see that as a success. Their main goal was to create a client experience that added significantly to the user's experience.
They made InfoTools, an application that allows users to highlight any word or phrase and draw upon any reference work the library subscribes to, in addition to many web resources and any other specified catalog.
Another resource they have is eBop, a self-service e-book ordering platform that has some features in common with Amazon, like "others who ordered this also ordered...", but it also has other very useful features like the ability to check if the ordering library already has ordered this particular title.
As for generation of revenue, they have implemented microtransactions, and they seem to be working.
This ends our overview of the first day of our two-day conference.
Goodnight and love to all my friends and family, until tomorrow. :-)
London, Day 11, June 27, 2007
Wednesday. The last day before the conference. We're all excited about the conference, at least I am. I think it's going to be very good.
E-Government is the theme of the day. Great fun was had by all...
We set off from school and took the tube, and then walked to 70 Whitehall where we were sitting right above 10 Downing Street and heard about e-Government. We were led by none other than...
...our fearless leader, Anthony Watkinson, also known affectionately to us as "Whitebeard"!
Along the way we passed the ever-so-characteristic guard on horse that no London visit should be without.
In the background of this photo, behind the cool car, we can see a monument to fallen heroes. I'm not sure which one this is, because there were two, one for the women and one for the workers. 
As we were walking toward 70 Whitehall, we passed an anti-war protest. An interesting thing to note about this day is that it was the day that Blair handed over the government to Brown, so the protesters thought it was a good time to let the new PM know that they had truly had enough of this insane war.
A protester selling T-shirts.
From here we could see the Houses of Parliament. Very exciting.
Here we are at the entrance of 70 Whitehall. Here we were asked to surrender our cell phones and told that we could not take photographs. So that's the end of the pictures, except for one irresistible one that De. took inside the bathroom, you will understand why....
The bathroom at 70 Whitehall won the "loo of the year" award. How hilarious is that?!?!
Seriously now, once inside we were brought into a very elegant conference room where we were served coffee, tea and biscuits of various kinds (a lot of shortbread during this trip). And then our lecture began.
The presentation was given by Alan Pawsey, the Head of Publishing Services at the OPSI, the Office of Public Sector Information. The responsibilities of this office are to manage Crown copyright, Parliamentary copyright, advising on all manner of governmental publication, and they themselves physically publish all UK Legislation and Official Gazettes.
Interestingly, in recent years most of the publishing done by the HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationery Office) has been privatized through a bidding process. Currently most governmental publishing is done by TSO, The Stationery Office, Ltd. The OPSI manages the Legal Deposit requirements, as well, which ensures that a copy of every official document is deposited in each of the six legal deposit libraries in the UK (among which is also the British Library).
In 1995 they started publishing many documents online, and as of 2005 there is a growing number of publications that are available only online. So e-publishing is gaining more and more ground for governmental publications, as broadband internet access becomes more and more universal. The demand for print copies of documents has been declining steadily, which has encouraged the publishers to increase their online only output.
After this presentation, we took the train to Kew and walked to the National Archives, where we first had lunch, followed by two presentations.
The first was given by Dan Jones, Head of business development. He spoke to us of the projects in e-publishing initiated by TNA (The National Archives), and it was an extremely interesting presentation, both conceptually and because it was fascinating to hear how these huge projects are physically executed.
TNA has embarked on many digitization projects to ensure preservation of many fragile original documents, and to provide greater access to the same. Of course, there is also a commercial aspect. Genealogy is a great passion of the English, and it has been and continues to be the main driving force behind these digitization projects.
The largest project attempted to date was the digitization of the Census. Anecdotally, Dan told us how in the first hour of the Census going online, the site was hit by such a deluge of requests that it crashed and remained down for eight months. A lesson learned, of course.
TNA employs a mixed business model for these e-publishing projects. There are programs that are internally funded and delivered via the TNA website, for example Documents Online. Then there are externally commercially funded projects that are licensed to private companies under a licensing program called LIA. The LIA projects are entirely managed and also delivered by the commercial partners. And then there are Then there are grant funded projects (for example by JISC), which are delivered by either or both of the above providers.
Additionally, there are also a number of academic projects conducted in partnership with higher education institutions and run together on a non-exclusive basis.
When discussing the commercial partnerships, of interest were the pros and cons of the operations: on the pro side there is the fact that the risk is entirely taken on by the commercial partner; on the con side, there is the potential for loss of control on the part of TNA.
The second presentation was given by a gentleman called Alan Jones, who runs the Docs Online helpdesk. His presentation was highly entertaining, as well as being informative. He gave us a demonstration of one of his favorite e-publishing projects, which involved digitizing the wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from 1384 to 1858. He demonstrated how one would search for a will, what it would look like, and so forth. It was great to see these original documents, all written by hand, some very difficult to read, but so beautiful as artifacts. And of course the intrinsic value of such documents is immediately apparent, for historians, sociologists, students of economics, social history, and so forth. The search results give the transcription of the first few lines of each will, enough to enable the searcher to figure out whether this is the will he or she was looking for. Once a will is selected, however, the original document scan is pulled up, and it is up to the user to decipher the handwriting, which can be very challenging. This presentation was great fun.
And now, a note on the weather. During this entire trip it has rained every day. Not continuously, and not hard. We have never been hindered by the rain, and whenever we had to walk for any distance (it was quite common for us to have to walk for about half an hour from one place to the next) we were never rained on.
The exception to this rule occurred today, when we left the National Archives. We were done for the day, and were free to make our way back to the train station and head back to London. We were encouraged, however, to visit Kew Gardens, which were right behind the train tracks, as it happens. Unfortunately, it really did begin to rain quite hard as we were walking toward the station, and we were discouraged. It's been a long two weeks, and tomorrow the conference begins. As much as the gardens were enticing, we were exhausted, and went home instead.
So, until tomorrow, good night to all my friends and loved ones.
The presentation was given by Alan Pawsey, the Head of Publishing Services at the OPSI, the Office of Public Sector Information. The responsibilities of this office are to manage Crown copyright, Parliamentary copyright, advising on all manner of governmental publication, and they themselves physically publish all UK Legislation and Official Gazettes.
Interestingly, in recent years most of the publishing done by the HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationery Office) has been privatized through a bidding process. Currently most governmental publishing is done by TSO, The Stationery Office, Ltd. The OPSI manages the Legal Deposit requirements, as well, which ensures that a copy of every official document is deposited in each of the six legal deposit libraries in the UK (among which is also the British Library).
In 1995 they started publishing many documents online, and as of 2005 there is a growing number of publications that are available only online. So e-publishing is gaining more and more ground for governmental publications, as broadband internet access becomes more and more universal. The demand for print copies of documents has been declining steadily, which has encouraged the publishers to increase their online only output.
After this presentation, we took the train to Kew and walked to the National Archives, where we first had lunch, followed by two presentations.
The first was given by Dan Jones, Head of business development. He spoke to us of the projects in e-publishing initiated by TNA (The National Archives), and it was an extremely interesting presentation, both conceptually and because it was fascinating to hear how these huge projects are physically executed.
TNA has embarked on many digitization projects to ensure preservation of many fragile original documents, and to provide greater access to the same. Of course, there is also a commercial aspect. Genealogy is a great passion of the English, and it has been and continues to be the main driving force behind these digitization projects.
The largest project attempted to date was the digitization of the Census. Anecdotally, Dan told us how in the first hour of the Census going online, the site was hit by such a deluge of requests that it crashed and remained down for eight months. A lesson learned, of course.
TNA employs a mixed business model for these e-publishing projects. There are programs that are internally funded and delivered via the TNA website, for example Documents Online. Then there are externally commercially funded projects that are licensed to private companies under a licensing program called LIA. The LIA projects are entirely managed and also delivered by the commercial partners. And then there are Then there are grant funded projects (for example by JISC), which are delivered by either or both of the above providers.
Additionally, there are also a number of academic projects conducted in partnership with higher education institutions and run together on a non-exclusive basis.
When discussing the commercial partnerships, of interest were the pros and cons of the operations: on the pro side there is the fact that the risk is entirely taken on by the commercial partner; on the con side, there is the potential for loss of control on the part of TNA.
The second presentation was given by a gentleman called Alan Jones, who runs the Docs Online helpdesk. His presentation was highly entertaining, as well as being informative. He gave us a demonstration of one of his favorite e-publishing projects, which involved digitizing the wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from 1384 to 1858. He demonstrated how one would search for a will, what it would look like, and so forth. It was great to see these original documents, all written by hand, some very difficult to read, but so beautiful as artifacts. And of course the intrinsic value of such documents is immediately apparent, for historians, sociologists, students of economics, social history, and so forth. The search results give the transcription of the first few lines of each will, enough to enable the searcher to figure out whether this is the will he or she was looking for. Once a will is selected, however, the original document scan is pulled up, and it is up to the user to decipher the handwriting, which can be very challenging. This presentation was great fun.
And now, a note on the weather. During this entire trip it has rained every day. Not continuously, and not hard. We have never been hindered by the rain, and whenever we had to walk for any distance (it was quite common for us to have to walk for about half an hour from one place to the next) we were never rained on.
The exception to this rule occurred today, when we left the National Archives. We were done for the day, and were free to make our way back to the train station and head back to London. We were encouraged, however, to visit Kew Gardens, which were right behind the train tracks, as it happens. Unfortunately, it really did begin to rain quite hard as we were walking toward the station, and we were discouraged. It's been a long two weeks, and tomorrow the conference begins. As much as the gardens were enticing, we were exhausted, and went home instead.
So, until tomorrow, good night to all my friends and loved ones.
London, Day 10, June 26, 2007
Tuesday: this was our second all-day trip day. We went to Cambridge! As I did with Oxford, I will dwell only briefly on the lectures and presentations. This will be a day of photographs and very brief notes on the "school" portion of the day.
For the first time De and I were late for the meeting at the bus, and we were almost left behind. We got lost not in the streets of London, but in the UCL building. In our defense, I will say that that building is a veritable labyrinth if ever there was one. Anyway, we made it in the end, and they did wait for us, and we made good time on the trip, and arrived in Cambridge on time.
Cambridge is so beautiful it's breathtaking! But see for yourselves....
Once we arrived in Cambridge, our first visit was to ProQuest, where we had several brief presentations on the themes of e-collections, e-aggregations and e-book publishing. ProQuest has a lot in common with Thomson, in the sense of aggregating and organizing information as a service to researchers. One-stop-shopping that gives access to organized content, speeding up and simplifying the searching portion of research. Their targe audience is made up of scholars and students. The focus of the presentations was aggregation.
A very interesting presentation was given by a guest speaker from Cambridge University Press, Richard Fisher on e-monographs. Richard is executive director in the humanities and social sciences at CUP.
After the morning talks we were driven to a pub where we had the best pub lunch of the entire trip, I would say. At least I did. I had steak and ale pie (beef stew cooked in beer in a short crust) which was delicious, with mashed potatoes and gravy and another vegetable which I can't remember now. It was very, very good.
After lunch we drove to Cambridge University, and visited the Cambridge University Library.
Here we are, standing outside the Cambridge University Library, ready to begin our tour.
Anthony gave us some history of the university. This is his alma mater, so he was very proud to tell us all about it. Once inside the library, we had our afternoon presentation. Regretfully, this was perhaps the least satisfying of all the presentations we've had during this trip, because the speaker had a bad habit of standing too far from the microphone, not looking at us while she spoke and speaking in a very low whisper, which made it almost impossible to follow her. The topic of her talk was Cambridge's involvement with creating a DSpace repository. The topic was interesting, but the presentation was poorly delivered.
Phil and De standing outside one of the buildings in the university, listening to Anthony. This was a really fun day.
Sam, in front of the library.
Becky.
This was a charming building on the river where the punting boats are. I could have stood on this bridge for hours. As you will see in the next few pictures, the view was almost unbearably beautiful.
Not too much wind in these willos this afternoon, but boy, what willows. One of my very favorite trees, these were absolutely spectacular. They made me want to weep from the sheer pleasure of looking at them.
Please click on these pictures and let them fill your screen to get the maximum impact. Standing on the bridge and having this view fill my field of vision was such a sensual pleasure. It made me nostalgic for my boarding school days, and also nostalgic for something I've never experienced in life but feel that I wish I had.
After lingering on the bridge for a while, we started walking toward Pembroke College, which was Anthony's college when he was a student at Cambridge. Each college is independent in many ways. Most notably from our perspective, each college has its very own library, so that is where we are headed.
During our walk toward Pembroke, I took pictures of the town of Cambridge. What can I say, the charm just oozed out of every brick and stone.
Here we are walking along this marvelous stretch of castle-like buildings.
The other side of the street.
Here we are arriving at Pembroke.
Just look at these trees!
And here it is, the library of Pembroke College.
I took this picture for my mother. Look at the flowers, Mamma!
This 14th century building (or thereabouts) has had a recent addition put on, and I documented some of the places where the old and new structure meet. I think it's quite harmonious.
A stained glass window along one wall of one of the reading rooms.
A view out of the window opposite to the stained glass one. I just couldn't resist this view, the idea that one could say, oh, yes, this is my campus, I look out the window and this is what I see. It's very Harry Potter, too!
This is the main reading room on the upstairs floor. It's been beautifully restored and is quite breathtaking. Who wouldn't want to study in here?
A spiral staircase that took us back down to the ground floor. I have neglected to mention that we received this lovely tour courtesy of the gracious librarian of Pembroke College, Patricia Aske.
This is the last picture of this day. I just love it. D and Andy are sharing a brownie, sitting on a wall with those wonderful castle-like buildings in the background. It just illustrates what a companionable spirit our group enjoyed during this wonderful trip.
For the first time De and I were late for the meeting at the bus, and we were almost left behind. We got lost not in the streets of London, but in the UCL building. In our defense, I will say that that building is a veritable labyrinth if ever there was one. Anyway, we made it in the end, and they did wait for us, and we made good time on the trip, and arrived in Cambridge on time.
Cambridge is so beautiful it's breathtaking! But see for yourselves....
Once we arrived in Cambridge, our first visit was to ProQuest, where we had several brief presentations on the themes of e-collections, e-aggregations and e-book publishing. ProQuest has a lot in common with Thomson, in the sense of aggregating and organizing information as a service to researchers. One-stop-shopping that gives access to organized content, speeding up and simplifying the searching portion of research. Their targe audience is made up of scholars and students. The focus of the presentations was aggregation.
A very interesting presentation was given by a guest speaker from Cambridge University Press, Richard Fisher on e-monographs. Richard is executive director in the humanities and social sciences at CUP.
After the morning talks we were driven to a pub where we had the best pub lunch of the entire trip, I would say. At least I did. I had steak and ale pie (beef stew cooked in beer in a short crust) which was delicious, with mashed potatoes and gravy and another vegetable which I can't remember now. It was very, very good.
After lunch we drove to Cambridge University, and visited the Cambridge University Library.
Here we are, standing outside the Cambridge University Library, ready to begin our tour.
Anthony gave us some history of the university. This is his alma mater, so he was very proud to tell us all about it. Once inside the library, we had our afternoon presentation. Regretfully, this was perhaps the least satisfying of all the presentations we've had during this trip, because the speaker had a bad habit of standing too far from the microphone, not looking at us while she spoke and speaking in a very low whisper, which made it almost impossible to follow her. The topic of her talk was Cambridge's involvement with creating a DSpace repository. The topic was interesting, but the presentation was poorly delivered.
Phil and De standing outside one of the buildings in the university, listening to Anthony. This was a really fun day.
Sam, in front of the library.
Becky.
This was a charming building on the river where the punting boats are. I could have stood on this bridge for hours. As you will see in the next few pictures, the view was almost unbearably beautiful.
Not too much wind in these willos this afternoon, but boy, what willows. One of my very favorite trees, these were absolutely spectacular. They made me want to weep from the sheer pleasure of looking at them.
Please click on these pictures and let them fill your screen to get the maximum impact. Standing on the bridge and having this view fill my field of vision was such a sensual pleasure. It made me nostalgic for my boarding school days, and also nostalgic for something I've never experienced in life but feel that I wish I had.
After lingering on the bridge for a while, we started walking toward Pembroke College, which was Anthony's college when he was a student at Cambridge. Each college is independent in many ways. Most notably from our perspective, each college has its very own library, so that is where we are headed.
During our walk toward Pembroke, I took pictures of the town of Cambridge. What can I say, the charm just oozed out of every brick and stone.
Here we are walking along this marvelous stretch of castle-like buildings.
The other side of the street.
Here we are arriving at Pembroke.
Just look at these trees!
And here it is, the library of Pembroke College.
I took this picture for my mother. Look at the flowers, Mamma!
This 14th century building (or thereabouts) has had a recent addition put on, and I documented some of the places where the old and new structure meet. I think it's quite harmonious.
A stained glass window along one wall of one of the reading rooms.
A view out of the window opposite to the stained glass one. I just couldn't resist this view, the idea that one could say, oh, yes, this is my campus, I look out the window and this is what I see. It's very Harry Potter, too!
This is the main reading room on the upstairs floor. It's been beautifully restored and is quite breathtaking. Who wouldn't want to study in here?
A spiral staircase that took us back down to the ground floor. I have neglected to mention that we received this lovely tour courtesy of the gracious librarian of Pembroke College, Patricia Aske.
This is the last picture of this day. I just love it. D and Andy are sharing a brownie, sitting on a wall with those wonderful castle-like buildings in the background. It just illustrates what a companionable spirit our group enjoyed during this wonderful trip.
We got back on the bus and rested and napped and looked at our pictures and chatted amiably until we got back to UCL. Then home, dinner, sleep...
Good night to all my friends and loved ones!
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