Hidenori Suzuki (Institute of Pure and Applied Physics, Japan Society of Applied Physics, Physical Society of Japan)
Since April 2005, with the support of SPARC Japan, the Institute of Pure and Applied Physics has studied overseas trends by attending the following three series of gatherings:
・ Online Information
・ STM Seminars and Conferences
・ CrossRef
I have presented a detailed report on the individual parts of the survey in the thought that the findings would be of interest.
● Online Information
This event is held annually in early December in London, at the Olympia Grand Hall. It consists of an exhibition together with a conference which draws about 900 delegates from 40 countries; it is thus a convenient opportunity to catch up with the latest information on e-journal systems and industry trends, as presented by STM publishers and vendors.
In 2007, the main theme was search solutions. Of particular interest were lectures on Scitopia, a new service created through the collaboration of leading science and technology societies in the US and the UK, and on the problems involved in commercial search sites such as Google. There were nearly 230 exhibitors. Among the most visible were European and American commercial publishers such as Elsevier, and online services provided by leading academic societies, such as Scitation, a service of the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
| 1. Scitopia
In competition with commercial search sites like Google and publishers like Elsevier, in February 2006 leading American and British science and technology societies together launched the search portal scitopia.org. As of 2009, there are 19 societies involved, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Physical Society (APS). Behind this move there are two issues: |
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Unlike commercial sites such as Google, where search results include numerous “junk articles,” Scitopia narrows the field to high-quality, peer-reviewed contents.
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As the participating societies account for over 60 percent of the citations in US patent documents, Scitopia’s cross searches are very useful in relation to patents. |
2. Scitation
AIP’s publicity focused more on its online journal hosting service, Scitation, than on its own journals. The service has become much more user-friendly thanks to Ajax and other Web 2.0 technology. While commercial publishers present themselves as ready to take on all the publishing duties of academic societies, American and British societies such as AIP and the Institute of Physics (IOP) are pursuing a business model focused solely on hosting online journals.
● STM Seminars and Conferences
STM is a gathering of almost 100 scientific, technical, and medical publishers from all over the world. In recent years, it has strengthened its programs by forming several new committees to keep pace with rapid changes in the industry (especially the open access movement in the EU countries).
1. STM Seminars
These are held annually in London over two days in early December, drawing 40 to 60 people. Two series, “E-Production” and “Innovations,” focus respectively on journal production and future trends. |
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E-Production: Recent key topics have been content management and outsourcing. Of particular interest was a lecture on content management in the digital era, which pointed to issues in digitizing back files.
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Innovations: Recent key topics have been Web 2.0 readiness and author identification. The shift to online services predicated on Web 2.0 technology is well under way in the United States and Europe.
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2. STM Conferences
These take place in Frankfurt twice yearly, in spring and autumn. Lectures and panel discussions focus on management and marketing in publishing; the autumn meeting, in particular, draws about 300 people as it is timed just before the Frankfurt Book Fair in early October. The SPARC Japan pamphlets that I distributed at this conference were well received and the supply was gone by the morning break.
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| A city square in Frankfurt, Germany |
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The Spring 2006 conference took a look at China. Reportedly, 7.5 percent of PhDs in science and technology in the USA are earned by Chinese nationals, and 25 percent of them have returned to China. Chinese researchers report the following obstacles to submitting English papers: difficulty writing in English (48 percent), difficulty communicating with publishers (36 percent), a need for the publishing process to be explained more clearly (56 percent). According to the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP), the rejection rate of submissions from China is 80 to 90 percent.
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In the area of Open Access (OA), the state of publishers’ readiness has been documented, and “optional OA” appears to be gaining acceptance in some fields. In the last three years, the emotional debate over OA among some researchers, libraries, and publishers has come to an end, and reports have appeared which give a calm and realistic analysis of the costs incurred at each stage of the distribution of scholarly information and discuss how they should be borne.
In 2008, under the title The Real Cost: Communicating the results of research: how much does it cost, and who pays? the Research Information Network (RIN) investigated and analyzed the costs of each component in the production and distribution of scholarly information in the UK. The full report can be viewed at http://www.rin.ac.uk/costs-funding-flows. This excellent and exhaustive cost analysis is the first of its kind.
3. STM Board Meeting
The STM Board has a full agenda driven by new trends and initiatives such as the OA question, the British Library’s response, inquiries from the EU, and approaches to digital copyright. Recently, the region of most interest to the Board has been China, which it is trying to involve in STM programs through overtures such as training seminars. Sadly, they are not interested in Japan. Also, commercial publishers are heavily represented, and I felt strongly that a better balance of participation by academic societies was needed.
The thorough planning and preparations for training seminars were impressive. Master Classes and Intensive Journal Courses were planned for North America, while the first STM Intensive Journal Course in Asia was held in Hong Kong in February 2008. The possibility of holding such a course in Tokyo was also considered, but it has been postponed because of the low anticipated attendance and Tokyo’s high costs.
● CrossRef
In 1999, leading European and American publishers launched CrossRef in order to develop a system linking citations to full papers. The Annual Meeting and Technical Meeting are held in November.
Since about 2006, the organization’s focus has been shifting from providing a system for adding reference links to ways of utilizing the accumulated metadata—a shift that reflects a receptive attitude toward Web 2.0. Topics discussed also include author identification and detecting plagiarism (CrossCheck). They have also issued guidelines for institutional repositories.
CrossCheck detects textual overlaps between a submitted manuscript and the full text of published papers held in the CrossRef database. The system produces a “similarity report” showing the percentage of the document that matches other content in the database as well as where that content comes from and other related information. While it is difficult to give a detailed evaluation without testing the service on actual documents, my impression was that it was fully operative. Societies such as APS and AIP and many commercial publishers, including Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley-Blackwell, are already members.
Acknowledgements
This survey brought me into contact with many of the latest topics in STM publishing which are not readily encountered in Japan. The efforts of Western publishers and libraries to keep abreast of the times were especially striking, and the survey afforded valuable chances to experience this climate at first hand. I would like to thank SPARC Japan for giving me this opportunity. |
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