Tag: Academic publishing

NASIG 2008: Managing Divergence of Print and Online Journals

Presenters: Beth Weston and Deena Acton

The National Library of Medicine spent 2007 examined the impact of content differences between print and online journals on library operations and services. They then followed up on this in 2008. In evaluating the situation, the NLM team working on this project were tasked with locating the differences between print and online, noting them, and then determining their impact.

One thing that is worth noting here is that the NLM is an archival library, by which I mean they consider it a part of their mission to retain copies of everything they collect. And, their ILL service to other libraries is considered an essential function.

Because NLM is responsible for indexing content for MEDLINE, they were able to locate the differences through the indexing workflow. They have noticed that there is anecdotal evidence of an increase in online-only content. Aside from the indexing, which will be decreasing over time, differences between print and online are discovered by patrons and reference librarians, as well as interlibrary loan staff.

The working group recommends that publishers take responsibility for identifying the version of record, and develop and implement a standard for communicating that version to subscribers. However, that’s only a start. Libraries will then need to determine how they will note that in their records, as well as workflows for following up on it.

The set that the working group looked at included 149 titles from 58 publishers, in both print and online formats, but which had additional online-only content. Data was collected for a specific set of these journals on: number of complete articles in each edition, editorials, commentary/letters, book/media reviews, advertisements, announcements/calendar items, and continuing education materials. Notifications about new issues, author correspondence information, and other extraneous content that is format-specific was not considered.

Approximately 13% of the articles were online-only, and 18% of the articles contained article-level online-only supplementary materials. Based on the one year sampling, they estimate that 12,739 articles from these 149 titles could be online-only.

One reason why there may be an increase in the divergence is due to the volume of content publishers want to provide versus the cost of printing all of it. It is likely that as the cost of publishing ejournals decreases in relation to the cost of print publishing, we will see more of this divergence.

[Side note: I really wish we would move away from the “presenting the data from my study” sessions to “here’s how I applied the data from my study” sessions.]

Harvard & the Open Access movement

A colleague called the Harvard faculty’s decision on making all of their works available in an institutional repository a “bold step towards online scholarship and open access.” I thought about this for a bit, and I’m not so sure it’s the right step, depending on how this process is done. Initially, I thought the resolution called for depositing articles before they are published, which would be difficult to enforce and likely result in the non-publication of said articles. However, upon further reflection and investigation, it seems that the resolution simply limits the outlets for faculty publication to those journals that allow for pre- or post-publication versions to be deposited in institutional repositories. Many publishers are moving in that direction, but it’s still not universal, and is unlikely to be so in the near future.

I am concerned that the short-term consequences will be increased difficulty in junior faculty getting their work published, thus creating another unnecessary barrier to tenure. I like the idea of a system that retains the scholarship generated at an institution, but I’m not sure if this is the right way to do it. Don’t get me wrong — repositories are a great way to collect the knowledge of an institution’s researchers, but they aren’t the holy grail solution to the scholarly communication crisis. Unless faculty put more of a priority on making their scholarship readily available to the world than on the prestige of the journal in which it is published, there will be little incentive to exclusively submit articles to publishers that allow them to be deposited in institutional repositories beyond mandatory participation. There are enough hungry junior faculty in the world to keep the top-shelf journal publishers in the black for years to come.

pruning?

One of the big projects I’ve been working on at MPOW is preparing to shift the bound journal collection, which also includes some systematic deselection. I don’t mean cancelling subscriptions. I’m talking about weeding the journals. We’re about to run out of space in the building with no prospects of anything new on the horizon, … Continue reading “pruning?”

One of the big projects I’ve been working on at MPOW is preparing to shift the bound journal collection, which also includes some systematic deselection. I don’t mean cancelling subscriptions. I’m talking about weeding the journals.

We’re about to run out of space in the building with no prospects of anything new on the horizon, so for the first time in forty years, the books are being weeded. The same thing has to happen to the journals, or we’ll be out of room for them, too. As it is, some areas are so tight that several sections of a range need to be shifted in order to add a new bound volume.

We started by pulling everything that is in JSTOR. This has freed up some significant space, but there is still a bit of dead wood in the collection. With online access, we’ve noticed a precipitous drop in print usage. Whereas we use to have an entire range of shelving for reshelve-prep, we now use a single book truck, which is rarely filled. Sure, we still need the journals that are not online in some fashion, but our students would prefer to use the electronic journals with free printing than get up from the computer, find the volume, and make a not-free photocopy of an article.

Sometimes I wonder why we continue to buy print journals at all, and the answer usually is that the publisher doesn’t have a good platform for their ejournals (if they have them), or for whatever reason, they seem kind of sketchy. Still, we’ve made a lot of transitions to online only in the past couple of years, and I think that will pan out well for slowing the collection growth to maximum capacity.

the future of the journal

pontificating on the impending demise of the journal

Karen Schneider will be speaking on a panel at ALA Midwinter on the topic of tech trends. She asks her readers if they have any thoughts about what is on the horizon.

The other day I was pontificating on the impending demise of the journal to a patient friend. Well, okay, not pontificating, but I was going off a bit about it. And not really the demise of the journal per se, but more about the change in how journals will be published in the future. The electronic format suits the nature of journals very well, and the trend towards born digital content is plainly glaring us in the face. However, one thing I have not heard discussed much is what this is doing to the concept of units within a journal.

Will we continue the arcane practice of breaking up journals into discrete volumes and issues? I don’t think so. Already we are seeing publishers take advantage of the electronic format by providing access (for subscribers) to articles in press prior to the actual publication date of the issue. I think that eventually, the journal as an entity will be comprised of an editorial board and review process, with a certain quantity of articles per year made available to subscribers as they clear that process.

Unless an issue has a particular theme, there’s almost no need to maintain the discreteness of paper publishing in the electronic world. Sure, we’ll need identifiers for citations and references and such, but we have that already with the DOI and OpenURL frameworks.

And besides, if our students no longer think of the journal as an entity, then eventually researchers will do the same because today’s students are tomorrow’s content providers.

recent articles read

I’ve been catching up on some professional reading.

I’ve read a few articles recently that I’ve found quite interesting and would like to share some thoughts on them.

Van de Sompel, Herbert, et. al. “Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve.” D-Lib Magazine. 10:9 (2004), doi:10.1045/september2004-vandesompel [open access]

I was immediately intrigued by what the creator of OpenURL (and his co-authors) might suggest as a technological solution to the current problems with scholarly communication. I couldn’t follow all of the technological details (they lost me at the flow charts and diagrams), but I was pleased to read this in the conclusion: “The NSF has recently recommended funding the authors of this paper to investigate these problems, building on our collective research and development. In a future article we will discuss our current work in moving toward a network overlay that promotes interoperability among heterogeneous data models and system implementations. We will describe our architectural vision for addressing the fundamental technical requirements of a next generation system for scholarly communication.”

Antelman, Kristin. “Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?.” College & Research Libraries. 65:5, 372-382. [open access]

The author set out to find data to confirm or debunk the common assumption that open access articles have a greater research impact than those which are not open access. She looks at four disciplines in different stages of open access development, and all of them have had a history with the use of pre-print articles. The data she gathers leads her to conclude that open access articles do have a greater research impact than those which are not freely available. I would like to see these types of studies extended to other disciplines, but I am pleased to see that someone out there is gathering data for the rest of us to share with the teaching/research faculty in the discussions about scholarly communication we should all be having.

Siebenberg, Tammy R., Betty Galbraith, and Eileen E. Brady. “Print versus Electronic Journal Use in Three Sci/Tech Disciplines: What

open access publications in library science

More thoughts, links, and general blabbing on open access publishing.

On the LIBLICENSE-L, Rick Anderson recently brought up the question of whether or not the American Libraries Association (ALA) has considered going to an open access publishing model for it’s publications. It seems that the Medical Library Association has one open access journal, although it isn’t listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) at this time and is only available through PubMedCentral. Oddly enough, they do have subscription rates. The Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) (a part of ALA) has made their Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship quarterly available online through an open access model.

As I mentioned yesterday, my dean asked me to put together some information about open access for the other librarians here and to come up with ways that we could be involved with the open access movement. I’ve been surfing around the web and in databases this afternoon, looking for articles and other information that can help me distill this nebulous thing down to something I and my colleagues can digest. I was surprised by how many titles were listed on the DOAJ page for library and information science. There is only one that I recognize imediately as being reputable, and that is D-Lib Magazine. Also, like any list of journals, there are likely to be title changes and publications that have ceased.

DOAJ

My library dean has me working on ways to bring more awareness of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and open access publications in general. It has been a while since I took a look at the DOAJ, so I have just spent about five minutes browsing around in there. It looks a lot … Continue reading “DOAJ”

My library dean has me working on ways to bring more awareness of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and open access publications in general. It has been a while since I took a look at the DOAJ, so I have just spent about five minutes browsing around in there. It looks a lot cleaner than I remembered. I appreciate the New Titles page, but as I was skimming through, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if they had an RSS feed for their new titles? Or at the very least, an email list?”

librarian publication

Can librarians change the publishing model by starting within their own?

I have been working on an article for Serials Review which required me to contact several different consultants who work with libraries, publishers, and vendors. While I was conversing with October Ivins, a thought came to me. We were talking about some of the issues surrounding publishing and pricing, and more specifically about alternative models such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the efforts of SPARC. She is of the opinion that alternatives like open access will not happen unless an entire organization or society agrees to follow the new model of publishing.

Her logic makes sense, and it got me thinking about which group should take the initiative and start changing the way they went about scholarly communication. Then it hit me: Why don’t librarians do this first? We’re the ones who are complaining the loudest when publishers like Elsevier dominate the market and dictate pricing. We should be the leaders marching forward to change the way publishing works in the digital age! And then, I realized the irony of my proposal having come from a conversation I had while writing an article for an Elsevier publication.

When I was asked to write this article, I knew who published the journal. It gave me a few twinges, but I couldn’t turn down the offer. Not when this was a chance for a rookie librarian to get published in an internationally recognized journal! However, this is exactly the mentality that perpetuates the problems we are currently facing in scholarly communication. I don’t have a solution, and I don’t know if I ever will. I do know that in the future I will try to be conscientious about where I publish my contributions to the profession, but it won’t be easy.

open-source scientific journals

Michael Eisen on open-source scientific journals.

I heard an interesting story/commentary [RealAudio] on open-source scientific journals on Marketplace yesterday. I’m glad that they are willing to report on business models that are not focused only on monetary gain. I liked Eisen’s midwife analogy, too.

Scientific and medical research is funded through taxes, and print and online subscriptions to scientific journals are very expensive. Commentator Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, explains the reasoning behind the launch of two new online biomedical journals and the unusual decision to make the sites available at no charge. “We’re upending the business model,” says Eisen. “Let the publishers become what they should be naturally: midwives to our research publications.” That way, he says, a thriving scientific publishing industry is maintained, but it has a free system of access that benefits all.

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