Transcript IoPP on-screen PowerPoint slides

Free access to truth? Scientific
Publication in the Internet Era
A view from a professional
society publisher
John Haynes
Head of Business Development, IoP Publishing
Ethical Forum on Electronic Publishing, Brussels
21 October 2002
[email protected], www.iop.org
The best or worst of times?
 Time of intense change?
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A turning point?
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Innovation / investment
Opportunity or threat
The ‘Google culture’
Internet as a disruptive technology
OAI-PMH, institutional repositories
Or same as it ever was?
‘The present mode of scientific publication is
predominantly through the 33,000-odd
scientific journals. It is incredibly cumbersome
and wasteful, and is in danger of breaking
down on account of expense.’
J D Bernal, 1939
Journals and Authors
 What do research scientists want?
 Credit
 Rapid dissemination
 Widest possible distribution
 Retrievability
 Citeability
 Permanence - archiving
 The journal ‘brand’ is paramount
 Authors ‘talk with their papers’ - they want
journals and peer review
Journal and Readers
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What do research scientists want?
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Content
 retrieve all relevant information online
Features / Functions
 browse (ToC’s, citation links)
 search (via A&I services and on j-platform)
 multimedia, more colour, additional data, ‘live’
math
Seamless access
 ubiquitous access to past and present
 free at point of use
How do journals help?
 The journal ‘brand’ signifies:
 Subject coverage
 Quality standard
 Character and style
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Remember:
 Librarians and Publishers are
INTERMEDIARIES between authors and
readers
Scholarly communication as a complex system
 Alternative approaches
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Self archiving
Budapest Open Access Initiative
PubMedCentral
Public Library of Science
Web e-print servers
Institutional repositories
How can technology help?
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Multiple options for distributing science will
strengthen communication
Experience shows it is much more difficult to
adopt new technologies throughout a complex
system than one might think
Journal economics
 Journal prices have increased faster than
inflation
 Journals have grown in size
 Fall in personal subscriptions
 Growth in supply of individual articles
 from 40m to 100m+ article since 1970’s
(US figures)
Journal economics
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Journal publishing has large fixed and
infrastructure costs and low marginal /
distribution costs
Electronic publishing has increased costs
 additional fixed costs of putting full text on the
web:
 staffing, software, etc
 elimination of print and physical distribution will
reduce costs
Small publishers do not have the advantage of
scale
 implications for the future / investment
requirements
Institute of Physics
 Founded in 1874 as The Physical Society
of London
 Mission-based professional society
 to serve members
 to promote physics education
 to disseminate information
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publish high-quality physics, pure and applied
Membership grown through the 1990’s
 37,000 members (ca 25% outside UK)
100% of publishing surplus goes back to
serve physics - special relationship with
community
Institute of Physics Publishing
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Journals
 First journal published in 1874
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Current output
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Proceedings of the Physical Society of London
36 journals (print and electronic)
12 on behalf of other organisations / learned
societies
Online journals (year-to-date 2002)
 10 million hits
 >2 million full-text downloads
Books, Magazines, Online databases
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Encyclopedia of Chemical Physics & Physical
Chemistry
Physics World, PhysicsWeb
Axiom
What is IOPP doing?
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Supporting innovative start ups and playing a
partnership role
 New Journal of Physics (SPARC Leading
Edge, IOP, German Physical Society)
 Journal of High Energy Physics (SISSA)
 JET Preprints and Reports (an example of an
institutional repository)
 TiPS - portal technology - author / reader tools
(EU project)
Involved in cross-industry groups
 PALS (Publisher and Library Solutions Group)
 RoMEO - Rights metadata (JISC project)
New investments
 E-Archival preservation - full-text back to 1874
What more is IOPP doing?
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Experimentation / adopting new technology
 Standards and interoperability
 XML work flow
 Reference linking (forward and back)
 STACKS, DOI, CrossRef
 OAI-PMH
 Open URL compliant
 Z39.50 - ‘distributed searching’
 Clustering and auto-classification technologies
 e.g. Vivisimo, LexiQuest
 Observation:
 the investment cycle is becoming shorter and
more intensive / expensive
What more is IOPP doing?
 Increase dissemination
 e.g. Open Access to extend visibility
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Free abstracts
New Journal of Physics
 open access, author charges
‘This Month’s Papers’
‘IOP Select’
IOP E-journal traffic doubles every 9 months
Liberal (‘author-friendly’) copyright policy
To be driven ever more strongly by our
authors and readers
What can / must be done?
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Partnerships / alliances become more important
 Get involved in cross-industry initiatives
 e.g. institutional repositories
 standards and technologies
 understanding of the complementary roles
 Involve authors and readers: Professional
societies are a natural partner
 e.g. the author / reader community is their
natural constituency
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Address the financial challenge
 i.e. How to make the successful transition from
seed funding to a sustainable financial model
Continue to ask difficult questions
 the role of traditional journals and librarians
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What must / can be done?
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Develop better understanding
 e.g. the realities of scholarly journals, how they
work, and their economic basis
 A ‘must read’: Towards Electronic Journals:
Tenopir and King, SLA, 2000
 Publishers, scientists, administrators need to
base their actions on facts, not emotions or
speculation
 of how alternative scholarly communication
initiatives can complement / conflict current
channels
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Constructive engagement
 academic administrators, librarians, publishers
and academics, e.g. re funding
Thank you
Questions, comments?