Evolution or Revolution: The Changing World of Scholarly

Publishing

UAMS eTech@noon

December 8, 2011

Mary L. Ryan, MLS, MPH

Director, UAMS Library

RyanMaryL@uams.edu

Disclosure

• NIH PubMed Central Advisory Committee

• AAHSL ScholCom Committee Chair

• MLA Scholarly Publishing Task Force

• MLA/AAHSL Joint Legislative Task Force

• BioMed Central Consultation Meeting

• No personal financial ties to any publishers

Outline

• Introduction & Definitions• Problems with Current Publishing System• Open Access Publishing• Semantic Publishing• Open Source Science• What to Do• Q&A

Historical Perspective

• Papyrus – 3800 BC?

• Movable type – 1455 AD

• 1st medical journals – 1667

• Technology– Computers – 1980’s– Internet & www – 1990’s

• Transition from ownership to access

Scholarly Communication

• “the formal and informal processes by which the research and scholarship of faculty, researchers, and independent scholars are created, evaluated, edited, formatted, distributed, organized, made accessible, archived, used, and transformed.” ACRL Create Change Brochure

“The written record is the lifeblood of science…Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is all based

on the way we disseminate our results.”

Dr. Harold Varmus

2002

Publishing

Formal system of scholarly communication• Registration of ideas• Certification• Awareness • Archiving

Participants

• Researchers – authors, reviewers, readers/consumers, reproducers

• Publishers – manage review, edit, distribute

• Librarians – select, pay, access, preserve

• Public

• Software & Infrastructure Developers

Major Questions

• Is the current scholarly publishing system broken?

• If so, how can it be fixed?

• Who pays?

Problems with Current System

• Not taking full advantage of technology

• Cost

• Complexity

Technology

• Not taking full advantage of technology and the Internet to improve research process – Speed up publication process– Wider and more equitable access – Provide efficient access to related information

and underlying datasets

Cost• STM publishing – $20 billion? annually• Conglomerates

– Reed Elsevier (Netherlands/UK)–2,000+ journals, 36%– Springer (US) – 2,000 journals, 38%– Wiley/Blackwell (US/UK?) – 1,500 journals, 41%– Wolters Kluwer (Netherlands)

• 700+ journals, LWW, Ovid, UTD, Cline-guide, Lexicomp

• Annual revenue $4.7b

COST (cont’d)

• Journal costs increase 8-10% annually

• Proliferation of journals

• Big deals/bundling

• Group purchasing

• Multi-year licenses

UAMS Library

• Cut 25% of staff in past10 years

• Spent $1.6m last FY for journals/databases

• Library budget cut $160,000 this FY

• Cutting 600 of 4,500 subscriptions

Complexity of Access

• Licensing agreements – access variables

• Access controls - proxy servers, passwords

• Maintenance of links in catalog & website

• Varying publisher/vendor interfaces

• Interlibrary loans, copyright fees

OA Publishing

• Journal articles available immediately for free on the Internet

• Permanently archived in standard format

• Authors retain the right to control the integrity and proper citation of their work

• Permits others to use information

• Directory of Open Access Journals – 7,306 www.doaj.org

Cost Shift

• Most open access publishers shift financial support for publishing from subscriptions to publication fees

• Foundations, institutions, libraries

Advantages of Open Access

• Accelerates research process/discoveries

• More efficient & cost-effective publishing

• More efficient and expanded access

• Expanded impact of research

Growing OA Support

• Scientists, organizations, universities • UK • US

– NIH Public Access Policy– HHMI – FRPAA (S.1373)– Alliance for Taxpayer Access

Some Concerns

• Financial viability of OA models

• Who pays fees?

• What about those who can’t pay?

• Support for scholarly association activities

• P&T and grant evaluations, prestige

• Peer review, vanity presses

NIH Public Access Policy

• Articles must be available in PMC within 1 year of publication

• PMC - www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov – Online repository of journal articles– Links from PM/MEDLINE citation to PMC for

full-text articles

Semantic Web

“ The semantic web will profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine.”

Tim Berners-Lee, 2001

Semantic Publishing

Anything that • enhances meaning of a published journal article• facilitates automated discovery• enables linking to related articles• provides access to article data in actionable form

David Shotton, 2009

Examples

• Downloadable XML & HTML articles - PLoS & Royal Society of Chem.

• Downloadable datasets • Audio and video, interactive image

challenges, drag & drop images – NEJM

• Structured Digital Abstracts – FEBS Letters

Semantic Publishing Questions

• What information needs to be provided?

• Who provides it? – Authors, Publishers, Editors, Others?

– Efficient processes – manual/automated?

– Who hosts the related info?

• Standards

• Economics

Open Source Science

• Karim Lakhani– www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf

• Michael Nielsen– Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

• Innovations at intersection of disciplines

• Main obstacles to sharing– competition for publication, P&T, rewards– intellectual property protection

• Open up science in some systematic way

Open Science Examples

• PLoS Currents: Influenza

• Rapid Research Notes – NCBI – Interaction/Discussion– Citable

• NIH GenBank

• Allen Institute for Brain Science

• BMC Trials

What to do?

– Be aware of issues and participate in developing new ways to share information more efficiently & effectively

– Negotiate to retain copyright when possible– Submit articles to and serve on OA ed. boards – Influence associations to be OA publishers– Influence colleagues - publish OA, P&T – Submit articles to PMC & other repositories– Share information as quickly as possible

“Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of

science. We may well see the day-to-day process of scientific research change more fundamentally over

the next few decades than over the past three centuries.”

Michael Nielsen, 2011

Conclusion

We need a more efficient, effective and equitable scholarly communication process. What it should or will look like remains to be determined.

Questions/Comments?