Trends in scholarly electronic publishing

Setting the context for the workshop

Workshops on Electronic Publishing

Indian Academy of Sciences

Bangalore

8-10 and 13-15 March 2002

What is electronic publishing?

• Creation, distribution and sharing of digital content through a variety of electronic media (web, CD-ROM, disk)

• True digital publishing - takes advantage of networking tools and multimedia capability

New Practices• Unbundling of articles from issue and volume, published

when ready• Quality assurance: new forms of peer review

(e.g. Open review, Faculty of 1000)

• Valued added publishing: referencing linking and other forms of linking (journals as bundles of links)

• International standards for document identification (e.g. Dublin Core, OAI, DOI)

• Powerful search capability and specialized search engines

New Concerns

• Version control, citation and bibliographic control

• Rights management• Long term archiving• Economic models: cost recovery• Practical problems: could print-based

practices be easily transferred to the electronic environment?

Conflicting and Overlapping Interests• Publishers: concerned with publishing costs, changing readership, changing user

expectations, rights management and archiving. • Authors and scholarly societies: self-publishing, new models for scholarly

publishing, quality assurance, rights management and archiving. • Researchers want simple access to complex information space, including easy

access to full text and reference linking. • Aggregators: managing content from multiple sources, providing reference linking

not just within their own service but to other content providers, ensuring completeness, and rights management and archiving.

• Libraries : challenges of keeping up with the flood of new content and new options, providing their users with easy access to information wherever it may happen to reside, rights management and archiving.

• Consortia: become very influential through cooperative purchasing and negotiation of licenses; they are concerned with assured access, and, of course, rights management and archiving….CONGRUCENCE??

Decisions about going online• Will the project be based on shared resources of the

surrounding environment of facilities?(readiness assessment)

• Are there any costs that are directly assigned to the project? (what about long term sustainability?)

• What are the personnel implications? (management and planning)

• What new skills will need to be acquired?

• What are the new opportunities that could be exploited?

Access Models

• Author or Sponsor pay– through page charges/handling

charges; free to readers (e.g. BioMedCentral (BMC)

– Institute/Society/University pays, through increasing charges for other services, advertising, subscription savings; e.g. BMJ, online-only Bioline journals

– Government or other grant (e.g. SciELO, Brazil; NRC, Canada);

– Institutional e-print archiving

• Reader or institution pays– subscriptions/licenses e.g.

most established printed journals)

Free to readers Access toll

Differential charges to different readers (e.g. BMC, HINARI programme, PERI programme, eFIL…)