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BP Journal News
- To: sunstaff@iucr.org, epc@iucr.org
- Subject: BP Journal News
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 09:04:33 +0000
- Cc: John Helliwell <john.helliwell@man.ac.uk>
- Organization: IUCr
Dear All Some news items from the Blackwell Publishing Newsletter. Best wishes Peter Journal News January 2004 - Number 3 Subscription renewals for 2004 are looking good and we shall report on this with other market information in the next issue. In this issue we have three meeting reports, including one on the open access debate. We are heavily involved in this continuing debate, giving talks at meetings and briefing societies who ask for more information. We shall be meeting with the Wellcome Trust and the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to discuss Open Access issues and will report back on this in future. Comments on the first two issues of Journal News have been encouraging, and we would appreciate any other feedback, particularly on the preferred format. Bob Campbell President, Blackwell Publishing Editorial Best Practice: Making the Impact Factor work for you Love it or hate it, Impact Factor* remains the standard measure of journal quality. It contributes to key decisions across the entire spectrum of academic life, from tenure and promotion committees assessing candidates, through librarians deselecting journals and funding bodies evaluating bids, to researchers who are choosing where to submit an article. Editors and societies face a simple question: how can we increase our journal's Impact Factor, and so optimise influence in the academic community? Readership - at the heart of Blackwell's publishing strategy - is a crucial consideration. There is a virtuous circle whereby increased readership boosts citation levels, which in turn draws in good contributors, further driving up readership, and so on upwards. Blackwell is at the forefront of innovation in electronic readership, through active involvement in initiatives such as CrossRef, collaboration with Google to ensure that our content ranks highly in search results, market-leading arrangements with library consortia, and through continuous improvement of Blackwell Synergy. The results are impressive. Electronic readership of Child Development increased sevenfold between 2001 and 2002. In the same period, its Impact Factor rose by 27 per cent, an increase founded on the excellent levels of readership. There are also simple steps that you can take: 1. Court high impact academics and convince them to publish with you. When Blackwell launched Ecology Letters in 1998, the Editors invited 60 prominent academics to submit papers. More than half did so, helping establish the journal in the community. Ecology Letters is now ranked 10/101 in ISI's Ecology category, and has recently been commended for having the highest percentage increase in Impact Factor in its field. 2. Ensure that your review process works efficiently and that turnaround times are short. 3. Publish your best papers early in the year to make the most of the citation 'window'. A paper published in January accrues citations for almost a year more than one published in December. 4. Commission review and survey articles. In 1999 and 2000, review articles published in BJU International attracted more than twice the level of citation of research papers. On average, review articles are cited two or three times as often as original articles. 5. Commission special issues with prestigious guest editors. Sociology of Health and Illness published two high impact papers per year between 1994 and 1997. This increased to seven papers in 1998, with six of the papers coming from a landmark special issue on health inequalities. The journal rose from 10th to 8th place (out of 97) in the next ISI Sociology rankings. 6. Network wherever you can. Personal bonds play a significant role in submissions. 7. Publish abstracts. They don't count as source items, so any citations they attract are divided by zero! 8. Avoid Case Reports and other short communications that are not viewed as research papers. They count as source items and almost never get cited. 9. Controversial articles are good. Vigorous debate can attract plenty of citations. These strategies focus essentially on one issue: the perceived quality of articles published. Any steps you can take to improve quality - and the community's perception of this - will have a beneficial effect on your journal's Impact Factor. *The Impact Factor is a numerical measure of how much impact the average article from a journal has on other published articles. It is: The number of citations received in one year to articles published in the two consecutive years previously _______________________________________________________________________________ The number of articles published in the two consecutive years previously For further information about the Impact Factor, visit: http://www.isinet.com/essays/journalcitationreports/7.html/ Rod Cookson, Journals Editor, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Global Access to UK Research: Removing the Barriers Following are notes from a meeting held by JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) in November 2003, chaired by Reg Carr (Oxford University Librarian). In his opening address, Reg Carr made his view clear: "we are aiming for a scholarly communication system with much more open access". Delegates were largely from the pro open-access movement, and it was interesting to see them flexing their muscles. Their enthusiasm for OA was much more marked than the delegates at the recent meeting of the UKSG (serials librarians). There was, however, some acceptance of the unproven nature of the OA models followed by PLoS (Public Library of Science) and BioMedCentral and that the transition to such a model will not be easy. * David Lipman (NIH) argued for open access as the right of taxpayers who have funded the original research. He gave as the prime example the human genome project where researchers made their findings accessible to all thus speeding up the research process. He also advocated better linking between journals, books and databases. * Mark Walport (Wellcome Trust) admitted that he only reads what is accessible from his desktop. The Wellcome's mission is to foster and promote research; Walport thinks that this can be done more effectively through open access, which makes most use of the potential of new technology. He appreciates that many societies are dependent on publishing revenues but he would like to see them supported in a more transparent way. When pushed on whether Wellcome will insist on researchers it funds publishing with open access agencies he said this would not be fair on young researchers aiming to build a reputation. * Dr Alicia Wise (JISC) outlined the FAIR (focus on access to institutional resources) programme. The idea with this is that content should be separate from the services built up around it and free, but with scope for publishers to charge for any value they add to it. She sees publishers as necessary partners in creating and delivering the vision. There was less understanding of the potential of self archiving of articles in institutional repositories to undermine the current journal model. In theory it will be possible to find a paper through the global network of institutional repositories and access it free of charge, thus eliminating the need to pay the subscription or licence. If editors, however, insist on authors not making the final published version of their article available from their institutional repository then authors may submit to other journals with a more relaxed policy. But once widespread open access is achieved, who will need to subscribe and therefore finance the publishing process? * Stephen Pinfield (Nottingham University Librarian), like Alicia Wise, expects publishers will continue to have a role and that institutional repositories are complementary to the publishing status quo. His aim is to create 'institutional open-access OAI - compliant e-print repositories': * Institutional - set up / run by institutions, with content produced by faculty * Open access - freely available on the web * OAI-compliant - interoperable, using the Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata harvesting * E-print - electronic version of research papers, pre-prints and or post-prints * Repositories - of entire collections, archives, self-archiving. In addition, Jean-Claude Gueden (University of Montreal) gave a review of the development of scholarly communications. He began with the 'republic of letters', the original scholarly communication system that broke free from the court communication system in the 17th century. It was based on a researcher giving away their results but in return establishing witnesses for their being first. Academic societies moved more quickly than universities creating their journals and holding meetings. By the 19th century specialist publishers became involved partly to make contact with academics who might write books for them. The 20th century saw exponential growth in journals with the cost close to production costs; office space and academics' time came free. With the information crisis after WW2, libraries looked for guidance on what they could acquire. Gueden claims that the Science Citation Index established the concept of core titles in each subject which libraries must have and publishers have exploited this with their pricing policies. He suggested that the publishers' hold should be broken by academics returning to the republic of letters concept, achieving open, easy access based on "upstream financing". Bob Campbell, President, Blackwell Publishing Blackwell Publishing Statement on Open Access A number of organisations have issued fairly lengthy explanations of their policy on Open Access. We have summarised our view in a short statement: The combination of investment in technology and new pricing models is vastly increasing the access to journal content. As the publishing system develops it is likely that a number of different models will be tried and tested; the Open Access model is one of these. The customer, the research community, will decide what serves its needs best. Any publishing model will have to be sustainable, and not reliant on long-term subsidies or special funding. Copyright Assignment - new freedoms agreed and forms to fill Without the assignment of rights to the journal we are not able, legally, to publish any article or to make use of it electronically in the variety of ways that is now commonplace for any published research article. Our Copyright Assignment Form now takes into account a number of increasingly prevalent author 'freedoms', allowing us to accommodate the wishes of the majority of authors who publish in our journals with regard to their own ability to distribute and use their own work. For example: * Authors are now free to post unrefereed 'preprints' of their article on the web prior to submission to a journal. This would not normally be regarded as publication. * Authors are now free to post the accepted version of their own article on their own website for personal use. We ask only that they establish a link to the journal website and that they include the correct bibliographic references when available. * There is no longer a requirement for authors formally to seek permission from Blackwell to use their own material from a journal article in another publication of theirs providing, of course, that full bibliographic acknowledgement is given. All publishers can be audited with regard to their copyright policies and performance by national Reproduction Rights Organizations (RROs), such as the Copyright Clearance Center in the USA and the Copyright Licensing Agency in the UK. Blackwell Publishing must demonstrate that for each journal it has 100% compliance with regard to author assigned copyright. This means we need to have filed all signed Copyright Assignment Forms for published articles. Although most original articles are received with a signed CAF, this is generally often not the case for other article categories. By 31st March 2004, we will therefore need to refuse to put articles into production if a signed Copyright Assignment Form does not accompany them. If any article is sent to us without a signed CAF, it may lead to production delays or the publication of issues of reduced page extent. We have recently written to all editors with further information on this topic and we encourage all of you to ensure that all articles supplied to Blackwell are accompanied by signed copyright forms from the author. Production in the Electronic Environment - innovations and issues to consider The fourth STM serials production seminar was held in December 2003 with the participation of several Blackwell delegates. This highlighted the key issues that are impacting journal production in light of the fundamental shift to the electronic environment. Following is a summary of the key themes of the meeting that feed into our own production strategies. Bill Kasdorf spoke about XML (Extensible Markup Language). He gave an outline of the evolution of the XML language from its inception to the direction it can take electronic production processes in the future, summarized here: * XML emerged from the initial question: what if there was an agreed mark-up language that could enable unrelated systems to communicate with each other? * This question led to the second stage of experimentation, and the inevitable failure of some answers -SGML, for example, is to some extent a failure, though he said we should be properly respectful to failures like this one. * The third stage, he said, was irrational exuberance - the realization that his will change the world, though most people don't want the world to change. * The fourth stage has been reality therapy, ie. why does this not work like it is supposed to? This is where the customer's expectations are bigger than the creators' expectations. * He concluded by saying that XML is still evolving, providing production processes with exciting potential, frequent disappointments, eventual progress and incremental improvements. The quest for simplification complicates things but much of it does work. * XML allows every tiny component of content to be tagged, but the tags have to get into the files somehow. The key is to build the tagging into the workflow, including the future prospect of enabling authors and editors to do more with tagging at the beginning of the process. * He said that even the people behind technology like this often do not know where it is going to lead us and are making it up as they go along. Innovation comes from wanting, not needing. Bruce Rosenblum, a consultant working in the US, spoke about quality control in the production process, a big issue for all companies, including Blackwell. With the demands of new workflows in the production process, different inputs require new initial quality checks, different production processes require different production quality checks and more outputs require new proofing systems. He said that companies need to aim for a proactive rather than reactive approach to quality, and should start by reviewing the entire workflow. He pointed out that errors are more expensive to fix with each successive stage, so that, for example, copy-editing accuracy is more important now than it was in print. Evan Owens from JSTOR, spoke about the archiving of electronic journals. He ran through the specific issues that all publishers would have to take account of for posterity, including packaging, file formats, versions, DTDs and the way in which XML is coded. There are also broader issues of how to handle external links, the cherished look and feel and functionality. He hoped publishers could produce archive-friendly content suitable for long-term preservation at a tolerable cost to the scholarly publishing community. Anthony Watkinson, Journal Publisher, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Report from the First Society Publishing Seminar "Excellent Job", "As an editor and research professor, I was fascinated", "Outstanding" -- these are just a few of the comments from attendees at Blackwell Publishing's 1st Annual Society Publishing seminar. From all accounts it was a success! For some time Blackwell Publishing has planned to bring society clients together to learn about key issues in publishing from industry experts and each other. The first Blackwell Society Publishing seminar, held in December at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, drew 41 attendees representing societies in the humanities, social science, and science disciplines. Society editors and officers were able to network with one another, educate, share their views on key issues and challenges in publishing today, and benchmark the success of societies already succeeding in the electronic era. Nine leading industry experts were recruited by Blackwell to cover key issues in publishing. These included René Olivieri on the challenges and opportunities in the future of journal publishing, Ann Okerson on open access, Don King on readership and the changing economics of publishing, Nancy Gibbs on library purchasing in an electronic environment, Dale Flecker on routes to content, Gordon Tibbitts on CrossRef and archiving, and Mary Waltham on strategies to increase influence and ISI ranking. Case studies were presented by two successful society publishers: Alan Kraut, Executive Director of the American Psychological Society and Gary Natriello, Editor of Teacher's College Record, who described how they were able to dramatically grow the profile, impact, and revenues of their society and journal in the face of today's publishing challenges. Attendees and speakers alike were very charged and feedback was effervescent. We all learned a great deal about the issues and societies' views. It was clear that we found a format to deliver information and contacts that our society partners really need. We will broaden our reach to more partners as we hold the seminar annually. Amy Yodanis, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Blackwell Publishing, Boston Dawn Peters, Publicity Manager, Blackwell Publishing, Boston -- 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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