what i want to talk about knowing me, knowing you why do you want to publish? what do journals want...

What I want to talk about

• Knowing me, knowing you• Why do you want to publish?• What do journals want to publish?• What is the publication process?• How is publishing changing?

The verdict

Everything has changed

or

Nothing of consequence has changed

Publication = making public

only difference is being posted online and not rolling off the printing press

Who still prints out that really important article to read?

People are mainly using journal sites as electronic archives (searching definitely better)

US librarian panel, May 2006

• “When we have online resources, no one accesses print.”

• “If it’s online we want it; if it’s print we don’t”

• “Paper is a terrible way of distributing information. Journal content belongs online.”

And it’s got “worse” since then

• Some young researchers aren’t even aware that the journal they’re accessing exists in paper

Differences

DISTRIBUTION

• Speed• Geographical “reach”

• BMJ (1840)• 100,000 print copies go to BMA members,

10,000 go to librarians

• bmj.com (1995)• Now has three times the circulation of print

BMJ

1995 1998 2001 2006

Number of Online v Paper readers Online

now = 3 x Paper

Differences

DISCOVERY

• Everything is much more available whether you know what you’re looking for or not

• The Google effect

• Back issue digitisation (Find BMJ on www.pubmedcentral.org)

Differences

THE ARTICLE

References hypertext linking

Forward referencing

Data

Multimedia

1997-2002-2008

1997 predictions: the view from 2002

Differences

ACCESS

Paper,print, binding, postage = € € € €

Marginal cost of moving digital information around = nearly zero

Still, most traditional journals maintain access controls

(more on this later)

Exploiting the new media: to reduce print frustrations

Frustrations due to timing

Frustrations due to space

Frustrations due to the medium of paper

The common trajectory

paper

electronic

Time

Articles ahead of printArticles instead of print Canonical versions New sorts of content: blogs, podcasts, polls, multimedia

paper

electronic

Time

Advantages: online v print

Online Print

Length? Full text (or more) Summary (or less)

Timeliness? Immediate After a variable delay

Breadth? Multiple Single

Interactivity? Immediate: srapid response

DelayedLetters to the editor

Q: Which is the real journal?

paper

electronic

A: The e journal is the journal

Where is this heading?

paper

electronic

PoP, or Publish oblivious to Print

Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff

• Breakdown the barriers between the journal and the world

The way we were

•

The distance between us

tdelamothe@bmj.com

YesNo

unsolicited solicited

• Global voices on the AIDS catastrophe• War• Evaluating the quality of health information on the internet• The limits of medicine and the medicalisation of human

experience• Road traffic crashes• Neurodegenerative diseases• Doctors' well being• What is a good doctor and how can we make one• Managing chronic diseases • Doctor-patient communication and relationships• What doesn't work and how to show it

Theme issues chosen by readers

tdelamothe@bmj.com

Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff

• Open access

Open access: the context

Open access: the philosophy

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

George Bernard Shaw (irish playwright)

Open access: the vision

It's easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable, from any researcher's desk, worldwide for free.

- Steven Harnad

Open access: the definition

Electronic versions of the full text of peer reviewed, original research articles made freely available to all, immediately on publication.

Open access: the implementation

The (much reduced) costs of online publishing were met by the authors (funders) rather than readers (librarians)

new

Free access to all

old

manuscript + copyright

author author

€

manuscript + €

The funders’ revolt

As a funder of research, we are committed to ensuring that the results of the science we fund are disseminated widely and are freely available to all. Unfortunately, the distribution strategies currently used by many publishers prevent this.

The fundamental point is that as a research funder we have to question whether it is right that we, and others, are in the position of having to pay to read the results of the research that we fund.

Wellcome Trust

Revolting funders

• NIH• Wellcome Trust• UK research councils• NHS (maybe soon)• EU

(And revolting authors too, who are self archiving on institutional repositories and elsewhere)

Web 2.0

• Interactivity• Community• User generated content• Social networking….

……how could that translate into scientific journal practice?

Where might journals go?

Paper is brief and beautiful and I love it, but it’s a wholly inadequate medium to conduct the conversations that humanity has to have. What were journals created for in the first place? To enable knowledge creation by conversation, except that every exchange took six months. What we need is much more proficient knowledge creation.

- Bela Hartnavy, 1996

“Whenever I am lonely at night, I look at a large map depicting 61 000 internet routers spread throughout the world. I imagine sending out a spark, an idea, and a colleague from another country echoing that idea to his colleagues, over and over again, until the electronic chatter resembles the chanting of monks.” - CA Pickover

Conversation

Where might journals go?

“The power of bringing together the right minds around a subject in an on-line dialogue, well facilitated, well deliberated, I think has enormous potential to help us get through issues that we’ve never solved before. You see this embodied in the open source model for software creation. But that same model could apply to policy issues, social issues, educational issues.”

- Mario Morino

Where might journals go?

“The development of web and internet technologies may well signal the next big leap in the evolution of thought and reason. For we now have a medium in which ideas can travel, mutate, recombine and propagate with unprecedented ease and (increasingly) across the old barriers of culture, language, geography and central authority.”

- Andy Clark

Where might this lead for the scientific article?

So has the new technology

Changed everything

or

Changed nothing of any importance ??

*And - what are your predictions for the next five

years?