University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Comments to: Tim Cole
06.24.97
Being in Paris reminds me of the origins of journal publishing. Here, and at the same time in London, the first two journals were published:
LE JOURNAL DES SCAVANS & PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS in 1665.
Now, we count well over 90,000 journal publications and far more serials. There is no library in this world, that has all of them. In spite of mergers, marriages, etc. the number of new titles still increases and we have done little for the accessibility and retrieveability. Every 15 years the total output on paper doubles. Even the abstracting & indexing services cannot help very much any more. No wonder, in these days of information technology (IT) and electronic publishing (EP), that more and more people believe we can solve these problems digitally.
But do we realize, that we are creating a media gap? A gap between the words of conversation and conservation itself? This calls for action and coordination and we should try to optimize all the new challenges and not block new ways for information, communication and documentation. Publishing has always been a documentation activity: as we call it nowadays “Frozen Information”. In the foreseeable future we will deal with frozen, or static, as well as dynamic information and we have to find ways to cope with a new and hybrid information environment.
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I think, we should congratulate the Organizers. Although they claim that it has taken an awful long time to prepare for this conference, the fact alone that they could bring together so many experts with such a variety of topics, is something that we should merit. I learned a lot during these three days and I met with many very interesting people. The atmosphere was excellent and we all enjoyed a very open minded approach. I think that everybody involved (the players, the intermediaries and the users) wanted to contribute, since we are all in the same boat and nobody really knows what will be ahead of us. I wrote up many comments and I will make these available during the next few days. Today I will concentrate on some major issues. I will split them in three sections:
What I missed?
Statements from Individual Presentations
The Publishers' Point of View:
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Almost everybody has said it: there was an overrepresentation of physicists. I missed the biological sciences, some more chemistry, much more mathematics, medicine and all of the humanities and social sciences. I missed the abstracting & indexing community and the awareness services. The role of monographs, textbooks, secondary and tertiary publications was hardly discussed. Gray literature (they have their own meetings) failed. The financial role of advertising in some disciplines was barely touched upon. On the whole I felt that issues like availability, accessibility and retrievability should have got more attention, especially with regards to the developing countries and young people. Standards were mentioned as being important, but they are more important than we have dealt with. Instruction and training were discussed.
This list looks very negative. Maybe it is, but we should concentrate on everything that we have gained from this conference and that is a whole lot.
Summarizing I would like to state that we have been discussing the publishing activities around unsolicited papers offered for publication in scientific journals and their electronic equivalents and some first repositories by a rapid growing scientific community to a wide variety of publishers. Publishers can be learned societies, university presses, institutions, governments, privately and publicly owned companies. They all are part of the communication process. This process involves lots of specialists and is time- and cost-intensive. It may look old-fashioned to some, but it is well organized due to a long tradition, high commitment and quality control.
In my company, Springer-Verlag in Berlin/Heidelberg, we commission many works and we publish lots of monograms, handbooks, reference works, loose leaf collections, magazines, etc. I imagine that we will continue to commission useful works.
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The conference was preceded by a Workshop on "The Impact of Electronic Publishing on Literature Availability and Scientific Publishing in Developing Countries", jointly organized by the UNESCO Physics Action Council and the American Physical Society. I would like to congratulate Dr. Irving Lerch and his associates for this initiative. As it turned, out the workshop was almost a tutorial to the main themes of the conference and we had lively and open discussions. Dr. Lerch gave me a copy of the transparencies and I suggest to put them on the WWW.
I praise Dr. Harry Lustig (APS) for sharing the basic financial data of his society. He certainly has stimulated discussions of real costs involved in publishing. Working Group I discussed the economics of publishing extensively and we have heard the recommendations a few minutes ago.
The conference is supposed to come up with a comprehensive statement of all identified problems and these are manifold.
Mr. Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO, welcomed the conference, which is right in time since a new strategic period of six years will start this year. He also mentioned, that Prof. J. Lederberg will chair an international council on modern communications in science.
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This statement was repeated many times during the conference. The transmission of ideas, the transfer but also sharing of knowledge are key factors. Main issues to concentrate on, according to Mr. Mayor, are copyright, security, long term storage and peer review.
I would like to quote here Prof. Bryan Coles, who gave me a little poem:
The Scientist's View
At least let it be said of me when I am dead,
His sins were scarlet but his papers read!
Prof. Coles, being the first and keynote speaker, pleaded for a code of practice covering peer review, dating of documents, independent electronic archives and the introduction of a system of universal identifiers.
He also stated that less than 20% of academic scientists make frequent use of current awareness services, as opposed to more than 40% in industry.
One great area of uncertainty concerns the nature and management of the ultimate electronic archive.
I would like to quote Umberto Ecco, who, recently, in an interview said that our computers suffer from Alzheimer Disease. He was asked to say something about the upcoming Information Society and he stated that there are more specialized databases and collections of raw data available nowadays, that no normal human being could access any more. In addition, more and more disciplines seem to develop their own "language" and codes. This means that we are deviating from an universal information society and we will enter a time period of collective forgetting, like we had in the Antique. Who knows now what will be important in the future?
The second speaker, Mr. F. Mastroddi, DG XIII delivered an excellent research paper. He cited the European Council of Ministers: "the information content sector will be very important for the future information society".
He was the first of several speakers to mention that computer screens are not ideal for reading. The trend from "scribe to screen" however is there.
Dr. V. Canhos presented a very good paper on the "invisibility of scientists in developing countries". Internet or WWW might help here to stimulate the reading of relevant documents, both originating in the developing countries and coming from the industrial countries.
Already now does Internet connect 160 countries and the developing countries show highest growth rates.
Dr. Derek Law concentrated on preservation, which is much more than electronic archives or repositories. He pointed out that legal deposit only exists for the printed world. Access should be created now and when copyright runs out. Age is counted in days or months, not in years.
EP casts a longer shadow than it deserves. We should be able to do more with raw data. (This point was made as well by other speakers and also came up during discussions.)
Prof. R. Wedgeworth presented an overview of some important digital library projects in the USA, including his own at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently some 30 journals are supplied in SGML and a test-bed for scientists and students is being created. "The devil is with the detail", Prof. Wedgeworth said, referring to many implementation problems,
I made many more notes and these will be made available on the ICSU-Server.
Some interesting statements from other presentations were:
1. Superhighway or Dirt-Track?
2. America does not exist in the afternoon (on the Internet)
3. Europe does not exist in the (American) morning
4. Where is the rest of the world?
5. We need archival rescue teams
6. We want to pay for the drink, not for the bottle
Answer AdK: Publishers may offer a supermarket, but not a bar. Individual drinks are more expensive!
7. Do it, then fix it!
8. The winner takes it all
9. A publication is a public announcement
10. Documents are living
11. All publishers are equal, but some publishers are more equal than others
12. Copyright is the only legal means to reward the author's creativity. It is the author who owns it!
13. A lawyer always comes in when something has happened
14. The moral rights are most important
15. There will be a merger of EP and databases
16. Scientists should not become departmentalized
17. Scientists work with fluid information
18. It was all OK when money was still around
19. We need every piece of every article
20. Nobody mentioned Ted Nelson: Inventor of Hypertext
21. The role of the libraries is underestimated
22. There are major historical differences between Europe and the USA (e.g. page charges)
23. Science is changing, communication is changing, so: content must be changing
24. The biggest threat comes from the telecoms
25. The language can be a barrier, but we must understand that education will continue to start with local (your own) languages.
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1 The future will be hybrid. There will be a large variety of content, varying from raw material up to validated documents with multimedia supplements
We need document or information identifiers. We also need intelligent agents to find the information for us.
2. The funding agencies/governments, etc. have spent far more money on research but have neglected the concomitant costs of running/upgrading information systems. In some countries libraries are not
funded by central agencies, but have to acquire funding themselves.
Option: proactive policies at national & regional levels.
3. Publishers are part of the science community. They invest a lot in staff, training and infrastructure and employ many scientists. Publishers have always been an active part of the scientific information
System. STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, registered in The Netherlands, represents some 80% of all activities in this area. STM publishers are not media, broadcasting, software or telecom companies.
Option: we feel that a clarification of the publishing process is needed. This covers: research, editorial work, peer reviewing, in-house work, composition & lay-out, distribution up to collection management in libraries and documentation centers.
4. The Information Society needs standards or well-defined formats. These may vary with the nature of the content and the requirements of scientists and librarians.
Option: It is very important to channel the many individual developments.
5. In order to guarantee global accessibility and retrievability, which is particularly important to developing countries, it is very important to build prototypes of repositories and test these.
Option: ICSU-Press and UNESCO stimulate such developments.
6. The annual subscription seems the most practical model for licensing unlimited access within a controlled environment. Meta-information should be available for free.
Recommendation: Stimulation of Cost, Pricing and User Awareness.
7. The whole area of information usage (with fingerprinting, tattooing, water-marking, etc.) should offer an efficient control of the impact of the scientific communication process. It should help to improve the
awareness and use of scientific information and to avoid redundancies and overlap.
Recommendation: Start some good projects.
8. Peer reviewing is the best principle of scientific publishing. Peer reviewing has its own investments and these should be recognized and respected.
Recommendation: To earmark all works in the future with codes,
e.g. communication (preprint or - eprint)
- offered for publication with a date
- accepted for publication with a date and the journal title
- published with the meta-information and a document identifier, which should be included in the abstract
This should become a Code of Practice. It was suggested to add an R in a circle to the title to indicate a peer reviewed article. AP probably would be better.
9. All scientists should receive formal training in using electronic information, the preparation of electronic manuscripts as well as in efficient dissemination.
This ideally should start at undergraduate level.
Recommendation: To set up an international programme for training.
10. Last but not least Scientists/Authors have moral rights: the right of your name linked to your work and the right of integrity, protection against intellectual theft and fraud.
Recommendation: ICSU Press and UNESCO should stimulate the awareness of copyright and moral rights in general.
NB: Developing countries may require an easier-to-handle level of communication,, e.g. flat ASCII and no illustrations. This is a very difficult area with high additional costs involved ,if it is at all possible.
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Listing by Author's Name, in alphabetical order
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Comments to: Tim Cole
06.24.97