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Blackwell Publishing: Journal Newsletter - Issue 4
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: Blackwell Publishing: Journal Newsletter - Issue 4
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 09:13:09 +0100
- Organization: IUCr
Blackwell Publishing Journal News April 2004 - Number 4 In this issue there are three items on Open Access which reflects the ongoing interest in the subject. The Washington D.C. Principles should be of particular interest to society officers. There is also a summary of some of the progress we are making in improving availability of journals in the Developing World. Suggestions from readers are always welcome; this is still a relatively new service and we appreciate any feedback. Providing Free Access to Research in the Developing World The disparity in access to high quality scientific, medical and social science research between the developed and developing world is shown to be closely tied to the gap in wealth and health between peoples. The 'digital divide', as it is known, certainly has not helped to close the gap. Many of the organizations for which we publish are acutely aware of this divide and the potential of peer-reviewed research for engendering change. For this reason, Blackwell Publishing has been an active participant in a number of initiatives to make online journals available for free or at a greatly reduced price to countries that are traditionally not able to afford many print subscriptions. With the latest information and scientific evidence accessible to low-income countries, policy-makers, professors, scientists, and doctors will be better able to find solutions to issues of poverty, health, education and the environment. In addition, increased access to current research should lead to greater participation by scientists from the developing world in the global debate on any number of topics. By keeping up with current findings and research techniques, and through updated teaching curricula, there are increased opportunities for papers originating in the developing world to reach a global audience. For many years, Blackwell has offered deep discounts to developing world libraries for subscriptions to print journals. However, problems with funding and delivery meant that very few were able to take advantage of this. Online journals, and their low distribution costs, have changed all this. We can now open access to e-journals in any site anywhere through Blackwell Synergy. There are, of course, still challenges to surmount, though the nature of these has changed from postal problems to issues of hardware, bandwidth and internet infrastructure. There are many initiatives underway throughout the world to tackle these access issues, and we are glad to be able to contribute by making the research itself available. For more information on each of the Developing World initiatives, including the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (Bob Campbell, Blackwell Publishing's President, is also the Chairman of INASP), and those associated with the WHO and FAO, visit: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/librarians/developing_countries.asp Open Access/Pay to Publish Debate Rages On The Open Access debate continues on numerous fronts. It dominates the library e-mail discussions and has been the subject of many conferences. Within a circle of Open Access evangelists, analysts and consultants, and amongst the library and publishing cognoscenti, the subject is high on the agenda. In contrast with this, it does not yet seem to have caught the attention of the majority of journal authors, perhaps because it is less attractive to them. In the UK, the issues are being explored by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee in an inquiry on scientific publications. Bob Campbell, President of Blackwell Publishing, sat on a panel of publishers to give evidence to the Select Committee on 1st March 2004. This was an opportunity to draw attention to the tremendous increase in access that has been provided by online publishing and the use of consortia licenses. The Members of Parliament were also keen to hear about Blackwell's work with the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation to improve access in the developing world through the HINARI and AGORA programmes. For Blackwell's submission visit http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/docs/House_commons.doc For a transcript of the proceedings visit http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/uc399-i/uc39902.htm The committee will report its recommendations to the government at the end of the summer. The two author-pays publishers have been lobbying hard in hopes that the committee will suggest that grants include funding (say 1% of the grant) to pay for publication. The BBC picked up the item and interviewed Bob Campbell and Harold Varmus from the Public Library of Science on the Today programme a week later. The debate again focused on the breadth of access provided by the current publishing system. Bob also made the point, contested by Harold Varmus, that a system paid for by readers will tend to favour the effective filtering of content and maintain high quality, whereas a system funded by authors will tend to favour the authors but exclude those that do not have the funding to pay the publication charges. For a transcript of the Today programme visit http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/docs/RadioInterview10Mar04.doc Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science On 16th March 2004 a group of 49 societies and not-for-profit publishers (largely North American) issued a statement affirming their commitment to broad access to the scientific and medical literature. The free access signatories represented 600,000 members and 380 journals that offer 800,000 articles online, of which 447,000 are free. The essential points were: 1. commitment to innovation and wide dissemination 2. mission to maintain independence, vigour, trust and visibility that have established journals as reliable filters of research information 3. reinvest revenues in support of science (meetings, education, publishing etc) 4. free access: a. selected important articles are free online from publication b. full text is free within months of publication c. content is free in many low-income nations d. articles are free online through reference linking e. content is available for search engines 5. continue to work to develop long-term preservation solutions for online journals 6. support principle that publication fees should not be borne solely by research organizations; ability to publish should be equally available to all scientists 7. a free society should allow the co-existence of many publishing models At the end of March, Martin Frank (Executive Director of the American Physiological Society) invited other organizations to join the coalition in support of the principles. He believes that the principles provide the "middle ground" in the increasingly heated debate between those who advocate immediate unfettered online access and advocates of the current journal publishing system. He explained that the document was drafted in response to recent claims that these publishers' practices hinder the public's ability to access published scientific research. Open Access Funding Award for UK Crystallographers The International Union of Crystallography, a society for whom Blackwell publishes, is pursuing an experiment with open access publishing. The IUCr has been awarded funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to support open-access delivery of its journals, Acta Crystallographica Sections A-E, Journal of Applied Crystallography and Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, via its Crystallography Journals Online service. The award will mean the waiving of open-access publication charges for UK higher education staff who publish in these journals for a one-year period from 1 March 2004. This will make UK research more visible worldwide, assisted by the international standing of IUCr journals. From the beginning of 2004, authors publishing papers in IUCr journals have been given the opportunity to make their papers open access on Crystallography Journals Online, i.e. free of charge to all readers. Open-access papers will appear alongside standard subscriber-only papers for the foreseeable future. JISC is a committee of all UK further and higher education funding bodies, and is responsible for supporting the innovative use of information and communication technology to support learning, teaching and research. In December 2003, publishers were invited to tender for open-access funding of £150,000, the first round in a three-year programme designed to encourage as much open-access delivery of research findings as possible. The IUCr is one of four publishers to have made successful bids for this funding, the other three beneficiaries being the Public Library of Science (PLoS, for PLoS Biology), Institute of Physics Publishing (New Journal of Physics) and Lancaster University (Journal of Experimental Botany). For more information about the IUCr's open-access policy visit http://journals.iucr.org/services/openaccess.html All about Online - COUNTER Usage Statistics As you know, the use of online journals and other information resources is growing exponentially. It is widely agreed by publishers and librarians that the use of these resources should be measured in a consistent way. Librarians want to understand better how the information they buy from a variety of sources is being used, and publishers want to know how the information products they disseminate are being accessed. The COUNTER project (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) brought publishers, librarians and intermediaries together to create an agreed international Code of Practice governing the recording and exchange of online usage data. COUNTER was formally incorporated in England as a not-for-profit company, Counter Online Metrics in 2003. The International Advisory Board of COUNTER consists of leading experts from the publishing, library and intermediary world. It is supported by the main publishing organisations as well as ARL, Association of Research Libraries; JISC, Joint Information Systems Committee; NCLIS, National Commission on Libraries and Information Science; NISO, National Information Standards Organization; and UKSG, United Kingdom Serials Group. COUNTER is a good example of a responsible publishing sector working closely with the library community to create common standards. As a result of COUNTER, librarians can get accurate and comparable usage data from any of the participating publishers, including Blackwell, who incidentally were the first publishers to become COUNTER-compliant back in April 2003, Elsevier, Nature and Wiley. As a word of warning, BioMedCentral has so far chosen not to join COUNTER so there is no independent verification of any claims that they might make about usage of their content. For more information, visit http://www.projectcounter.org/ Library Advisory Board Meet Again In order to help inform our publishing and sales strategies, we call upon the advice and feedback from our international Library Advisory Board made up of 25 librarians and consortia officers from academic and corporate institutions. We have held two LAB meetings in the first part of this year; one in San Diego alongside the American Library Association meeting in January, and one in Melbourne alongside the Victorian Association of Library Automation meeting in February. Both meetings were well attended, full of lively and useful discussion, and we received very good feedback from attendees: "I would like to thank you, your staff and Blackwell for affording us the opportunity to express our views. It is heartening to see publishers undertaking this type of focus group activity." Jocelyn Priddey, Senior Manager, Collection Development, University of Queensland "Opportunity to contribute much appreciated and any critical comment was simply based on a genuine desire to help to make a good service even better." Neil Renison, Librarian (Acquisitions Services), Information Resources, James Cook University The meetings involved discussions of: * preferred future pricing models for library consortia including for online only journals and back volumes; * policies for handling journals joining and leaving publisher collections; * implications of purchasing journals based on usage; * potential demand for e-books; * perceptions of Blackwell's service to the library community. The overriding message we picked up from the librarians was that they want more flexibility in the way that they buy both print and online journals with a variety of options available to suit the budgetary, research and format needs of their institutions. What Authors Want Last year Blackwell Publishing commissioned Key Perspectives to carry out a study of the attitudes and opinions of journal contributing authors on various publishing issues. 1800 email invitations to respond were sent to Blackwell journal authors. 413 (23%) responded. The results overall were encouraging. For example, 88% of journal authors considered the Blackwell journal they published in to be "excellent" or "good", and over 80% considered Blackwell to have good expertise in their field and to operate to high professional standards. The question on factors of importance when authors are choosing where to publish gave "reputation of the journal" as top, "quality of content" second, and "quality of peer review" equal third with "speed of publication". "Impact factor" surprisingly only came seventh although with some variation between subjects: higher in dermatology and economics, lower in ecology and nursing. "Price", "value for money" "copyright and contract issues" came last. Examination of the comments revealed that by "speed of publication" most respondents meant speed of peer review. The quality of the peer review procedure also featured highly. Our conclusion was that outside the reputation of the journal (which cannot be improved overnight) the area where we need to work most to attract authors is not surprisingly "author care": giving authors a decision quickly and keeping them informed of progress. As publishers we are dependent on the performance of the editorial office for this and are developing a range of services to support this effort. Databases and Cannibalization Blackwell Publishing licenses journal content to third party databases, like EBSCO Publishing, with the understanding that this helps to reach more unique customers and readers beyond the journals' core subscription base. EBSCO Publishing is strong in the U.S. schools and college market and their association with the SOROS Foundation has given them good reach into Eastern Europe and the Developing World. They also serve the academic library market, however, and in order to avoid cannibalization of core subscriptions, we have differentiated the EBSCO Publishing offering by putting a 12-month embargo on all articles. Rick Anderson is Director of Resource Acquisition at the University of Nevada, Reno, Libraries, and a member of Blackwell Publishing's Library Advisory Board. Rick recently posted the following e-mail to the library community, explaining his view of aggregated databases (e.g. EBSCO Publishing). This supports our position that the judicious licensing of journal content should not lead to the substitution of core subscriptions. "Even when unreliable access costs money, most libraries are still willing to buy it, as long as the cost is low enough; that's the premise on which many aggregated databases (which provide access to thousands of journals and magazines at a very low per-title cost) are founded. While I expect my access to the database itself to be reliable, I recognize that the low per-title charge means a trade-off: ongoing access to any particular title is not guaranteed. But that's fine with my library because we don't think of the aggregator as a robust source for any particular title; we use it as a big bag of articles that primarily supports low-intensity undergraduate research. When we want reliable access to particular titles, we pay more (usually directly to the publishers) and get some level of guaranteed access in return." - Posted to Liblicense, 20th February 2004 Blackwell Publishing Acquires BMJ Books On 8th April 2004, Blackwell Publishing finalized the purchase of BMJ Books, the book-publishing arm of the British Medical Journal Publishing Group. Each year, Blackwell publishes over 100 books and 350 journals in medicine, biomedicine and allied health. With the acquisition of BMJ Books, titles in specialties such as pediatrics, accident and emergency medicine, anesthesia and intensive care, cardiology, and evidence-based medicine will be added to the company's list. "Blackwell has a history of providing the medical community with a comprehensive collection of high-quality medical books. The addition of BMJ titles only strengthens the scope of Blackwell's service to clinicians world-wide, and demonstrates our commitment to growth in medical publishing," said René Olivieri, CEO of Blackwell Publishing. "As this transfer moves forward, Blackwell will further the high service standards set by BMJ, reinforcing the strength of publishing excellence for which Blackwell is known." Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal and Chief Executive of BMJ Publishing Group Ltd said, "This decision has not been easy to make, but it is no longer feasible for us to continue an extensive book publishing business. We have published great books of which we are proud, but our cost structure has meant that we could not produce the return on the business that we hoped." The acquisition of BMJ Books brings 328 additional titles to the Blackwell list. This includes the ABC Series (reference books for researchers, clinicians, and health professionals) and a developing list of evidence-based textbooks, all of which complement Blackwell's existing Lecture Notes, At a Glance, and Blueprints series of books. "The BMJ Books list is very impressive and we are delighted to work with BMJ Publishing Group to continue production of these quality titles," said Andrew Robinson, Director of Medical Publishing for Blackwell. "As the leading society publisher, Blackwell is confident that our expertise will help build the BMJ brand in book publishing." Titles from BMJ will carry the imprints of both BMJ Books and Blackwell Publishing as part of the sales agreement. Preview of forthcoming topics for Journal News: * Editorial best practice - tips for running an editorial office * Editorial best practice - refereeing/peer-review * Trends in consortia buying * An overview of the China serials market * CrossRef Search details * The impact of Google Do let us know if you have any suggestions for topics to include in future issues, or any comments on this issue of Journal News. -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more details _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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