Not Cossacks and hussars, and not old style commies or
kulaks... We refer to Russian science, translated science,
the cream that the Russian research establishment has
to offer. It's now easier than ever before to acquire
the highest quality English translations of Russia's most prestigious science journals.
ACCESS met Lev Malov whose company translates Russian science
for the many of us who find Cyrillic
unreadable. more...
Full text Asian database from ProQuest
They used to be called databases. But now that the Web
allows us to combine different sorts of information in one place, we must
talk or 'resource'. As in ProQuest Asia has released a 'comprehensive Web
based resource' about Asia. The first module coming to a library near you
is about Greater China and is packed with masses of full text from sources
all over the world. Wondering what 'Greater China'
means? more...
These LOCKSS are not for picking
ACCESS reported a few issues ago about
the Stanford project to address digital preservation. Stanford you'll recall, is
the owner of the HighWire Press. The project is now
beta testing the LOCKSS software at 46 libraries around the world.
LOCKSS uses a decentralised peer to peer
network. more...
HighWire mousetrap offers big cheese
Others have tried to do it
including the Public Library of Science. But the HighWire Press has quietly
and elegantly outwitted them. What has HighWire done? It has created
a single site for digital scientific content deposition which provides enhanced searchability for
all of Medline plus the full text of 300 science
journals. more...
Gale and Ingenta go for cosy
integration
They both have
massive archives of journal articles. So perhaps it was only a matter of time
before Gale and Ingenta got together to offer a single search to access
online journals held by both of them. That means more
than 10,000
publications. more...
Lost for words? Look no
further...
OUP has a jewel of a product for you. Whether you're
looking for a definition, a phrase, the answer to a tricky question,
or just enjoy words, The Core Collection will give you a buzz. It
comprises more than a million dictionary definitions, facts and figures, people,
places and sayings all in one database. And it's yours for the
asking.
more...
Assumption versus reality
Does online document delivery and site licensing have an effect
on how researchers acquire information? And does this impact on journal subscriptions? The journal
and document delivery business is worth billions of dollars but these questions
have not been addressed for several years, until now. The Ingenta Institute
researched these issues in 2001 and the results have just been released. ACCESS readers can buy
the report at a greatly reduced price.
Interested?
more...
Soros again...BOAI this
time
He's from Hungary so no surprise that his new 'thing' is
called Budapest Open Access Initiative, BOAI. Its goal is to help accelerate the international effort
to make all research articles freely available on the internet. But not everybody
has welcomed
it. more...
Deposit those electronic publications
Many
countries have a law whereby publishers deposit a copy of their publications at the
national library. But what about electronic publications? Over 100 publishers have signed on
to a voluntary scheme for deposit of their electronic publications with the
British Library. More than 800 monographs and 850 journals have been
archived.
more...
It's that man again
George Soros is popping up all over the place.
Elsewhere in this issue of ACCESS you'll read about the Budapest
initiative. His Open Society Institute is
funding programmes aimed at providing science information to
countries who can least afford to buy it; and looking at
policy issues concerning access to information. He's teamed up with WHO
and some very big science publishers to make biomedical journals free of
charge to scientists in the poorest countries. The first stage involves
1,000
journals.
more...
American
Physical Society hopeful of greater visibility in Asia
Agreement with the iGroup should
mean an increase in journal
subscriptions
In a report in the APS News dated May
2000, Dr. Thomas McIlrath, APS Treasurer and Publisher, reminded us
that the purpose of the American Physical Society as enshrined in
its charter of 1899, is to Promote the Advancement and Diffusion of
the Knowledge of Physics. In the last 100 years the APS has
published the most prestigious and widely read physics journals in
the world. They are not only read by its membership of 40,000 which
includes 2,000 in Asia, but physicists the world over. Dr. McIlrath
was recently in Thailand where Clive Wing caught up with him to talk
about the APS, its profile in Asia, and the recent agreement signed
with the iGroup.
What is the publishing philosophy
of the Society?
The
way I look at the enterprise, our job is to diffuse the
knowledge of physics but we obviously have to recover costs.
The purpose of our charging anything at all is simply cost
recovery. There is also the question of trying to decide,
given that we can establish the total amount of money we need
to do our job, how to spread that burden among different
groups and people. We have very inexpensive member
subscriptions and we're developing a system where large
research institutions are bearing a larger burden than the
very small undergraduate institutions. It's still evolving and
it's a process that inevitably involves the entire community
in discussing what the philosophy should be. The 'community'
involves the Society leadership, members and also librarians
and the other parts of the physics community who happen not to
be members of the American Physical Society. I should also
emphasise that one of our important keystones is to work
cooperatively with other national physical societies and
organisations. It would be a great disservice and very much
against what we want, if our actions seem to be undercutting
the actions of societies in other countries. We try to be
conscious of that in everything that we
do.
Has the APS been influenced by the
example of the 'new' publishers like the HighWire
Press?
We try to learn
from everybody. We're a great believer in stealing whatever
ideas are useful! We had a group called the Lokun Committee
who issued a report 10 years ago which tried to project the
future of publishing with a focus entirely on electronic. Out
of this report came a vision that is remarkably similar to
what is being done now except it set goals to be reached by
2020. So what has happened has been an incredible
acceleration.
The HighWire
Press has shown an impressive amount of initiative and energy.
We look at what they do but it's worth keeping in mind that
different communities have different cultures and constraints.
So that those communities - astronomical, geophysical for
example - where the culture supports page charges, figure them
into their pricing models. In the case of physics, the culture
will not support page charges. In many countries, page charges
are a significant burden, so that's another reason why we
don't use them. In the life sciences and medical sciences,
there are different concepts of which elements shall be made
available free and which shall be charged. This is a question
of deciding what your culture and community want to
do.
There are many librarians here in
Asia concerned about the journals crisis. They tend to view
the society publishers as the good guys and the commercial
publishers as the bad guys. Does the APS have a position on
this?
I believe that
seldom is it useful to think in terms of good guys and bad
guys. Elsevier for example, is doing a business and has filled
a niche. The company wouldn't exist if it hadn't done that. My
opinions on publishing as a business reflect my American
background. I'm a passionate believer in competition. So if
any publisher, especially a commercial publisher, becomes so
dominant in the field that they can dictate what fraction of
the resources go to them, and you combine that with an
environment where the resources are limited and the products
are growing, librarians will run out of money. That's a
dangerous situation. The society publishers are essential to
provide an alternative to a group like Reed Elsevier so that
the core information can be distributed within an environment
where no group can dictate what the pricing should
be.
You've said that journals are a
silly idea. Want to expand on that?
'Silly' in the
sense that a body of information which is all relevant to a
broad discipline, gets subdivided by an editor and then made
available in groupings [journals] according to the editor's
subdivisions. That's obviously not what one would like,
pedagogically. Pedagogically one might very well be a
researcher who wants 50 percent of articles from one journal,
30 percent from another and 20 percent from somewhere else.
The existence of these groupings [journals] in a case like
physics, is driven more by the economics of creating print
products than it is by pedagogical or intellectual basis.
That's not to say that a division between biological and
physical science is not sensible because that has strong
pedagogical justification. But the difference between atomic
physics and non-linear physics and quantum theory? You just
can't divide things up that way. Speaking as a publisher who
only publishes physics, it is arbitrary to have it divided up
in our five core journals (Physical Review
ABCD&E
) as we
do now. And that is exemplified by the fact that our flagship
publication Physical Review Letters, includes articles from
every one of those fields, intended as it is to cover the
broad range of physics. It is the most prestigious and most
highly read of all our
journals.
Many publishers have used the Web
to reproduce the print publishing model, the only difference
being the medium. Customers still have to buy everything.
Whereas the beauty of the Web is that it allows the consumer
to pick and choose. The Web should be liberating the way
journals are sold rather than using the same old model.
Maybe pay per view is the answer.
Our Physical Review Online Archive, PROLA, covers material
three years old and older. Once you are in PROLA you get
everything. There is no PROLA PRA or PROLA PRB. What you say
is correct. We do have pay per view and we, AIP and APS, are
looking at ways of selling bundles of journals too. But again,
what is rational has to be achieved by means that are
economically viable. Sometimes you can stand on one side of
the valley and see that you ought to be on the other side but
there are lions, tigers and bears in between. You have to
figure out how to make that transition.
You're wanting
to have a higher profile in Asia. Are you offering special
pricing?
Certainly we are trying to exhibit
flexibility. Two or three years ago we announced that we would
make all of our electronic journals free to any country in
Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. Similarly the
Soros Foundation has a new initiative, the eIFL [Electronic
Information for Libraries Direct] project. We put in a
proposal for that which was accepted. In this case
subscriptions become free to some countries and at greatly
reduced price for others. We've also been cooperating with the
International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste,
Italy. We have given them permission to make hard copies of
our journals free of charge for countries where scientists
have trouble with direct internet connections. We've also
produced CD-ROMs which the people at Trieste distributed in
various countries. So we're trying to be sensitive to the
needs of different countries. In order to do this we also have
to be educated to what the different resources are from region
to region. It's often not easy for somebody as removed as we
parochial Americans are to figure out who has resources and
who doesn't! For instance there is a major problem in India.
Within the country you cannot say because it's India, they
either have money or they don't. There are institutions with
very good resources and there are institutions with almost
none. We would like a fairly uniform policy to deal with this,
but I don't think we have achieved that.
Why do you
have declining subscriptions in the US? Physics pre-print
servers?
Let me be clear. A declining
circulation is pretty common among society publishers in the
physical sciences. I can plot the decline from 1969 and
thereafter the rate has been constant. From that you can draw
your own conclusion about the importance of the pre-print
server! It is a lot like the stock market: after the fact you
can always understand why, but you cannot predict. A lot of
the decline in recent years has been the cancellation of
duplicate subscriptions. Large organisations wanted duplicate
print subscriptions so they could have some journals in their
physics department, undergraduate library and maybe the
engineering department. Now that researchers are getting more
and more of their information using electronic access (and our
policy is that once an institution buys a subscription they
get the right to provide access throughout their institution)
there is a constant erosion of the duplicate subscriptions.
That's also a major reason for our new multi-tier pricing
because duplicate subscriptions in the past, served as a way
for the large research institutions to carry the larger share
of the burden of publishing. As they cancel, the burden gets
shifted towards the smaller organisations. This decline is
happening everywhere. The pre-print servers are just another
part of the new world.
Would you
publish an article that has already appeared on a pre-print
server?
Yes. In fact we encourage this. We
are willing to take articles and put them up on the archive
pre-print server while we're considering them. We have a
mechanism for doing that. We have a mechanism for articles
that go up on that server to be forwarded to us for
consideration.
One year from
now what do u hope to see in terms of your work with the
iGroup?
My view of the iGroup is that it is
the source of information for us about a market we are
unfamiliar with. And so what I'm hoping is that the iGroup
will provide connections so that we are able to reach out to
make our journals available to both academic and non-academic
organisations that we normally wouldn't be able to bring to
the table. At the same time we want to do this in a way where
iGroup feels it is benefiting from the relationship and that
is it a long term
prospect.
What is the publishing philosophy
of the Society?
