Congratulations to all of the Shovers and Makers (S&M) and to the Movers and Shakers (M&S) award winners out there.
Somehow, I was awarded an S&M award this year.
Go ahead and nominate yourself -- you deserve it. You know you wanna.
My thoughts on librarianship, open access, computing, and other stuff.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Visited an EPA Library, Region 8 in Denver
Went to a presentation at the EPA Office in Denver today (Region 8). The presenter, David Selden, posted his slides from the talk on "Libraries and Environmental Sustainability" right here. David is a librarian at the Native American Rights Fund Library in Boulder, CO.
Here are the basics from his slides:
• Global Warming or None like it hot video from Futurama
• The Hockey stick chart.
• Per capita carbon emission chart showing the US is horrible compared to the rest of the world's countries.
• By 2050, we should try to be 80% below our 1990 levels in CO2 emission.
• 80% of glaciers will be gone by 2035.
• The oceans will rise 1 meter over the next century. Shows what it will do to Florida.
• The Pika is threatened.
He provided some data showing how much CO2 emissions come from various activities like driving and flying. Some data can be found at Carbonfund.org, but these numbers do not match David's numbers precisely.The Building is a LEED Gold Standard building, and we saw some of it with a tour. Particularly interesting was the Green Roof at the top of the building. I also really liked the sails used at the top of the building to redirect light from the skylights to the lower levels.
We also went into the Library on the 2nd floor which is available to the public from 8am-4pm. I wish I could have taken pictures, but they don't allow that in the EPA building. It was pretty cool. I did get an EPA tatoo. Here is some documentation I grabbed. Overall, I really enjoyed visiting the EPA Region 8 library.
Here are the basics from his slides:
• Global Warming or None like it hot video from Futurama
• The Hockey stick chart.
• Per capita carbon emission chart showing the US is horrible compared to the rest of the world's countries.
• By 2050, we should try to be 80% below our 1990 levels in CO2 emission.
• 80% of glaciers will be gone by 2035.
• The oceans will rise 1 meter over the next century. Shows what it will do to Florida.
• The Pika is threatened.
He provided some data showing how much CO2 emissions come from various activities like driving and flying. Some data can be found at Carbonfund.org, but these numbers do not match David's numbers precisely.The Building is a LEED Gold Standard building, and we saw some of it with a tour. Particularly interesting was the Green Roof at the top of the building. I also really liked the sails used at the top of the building to redirect light from the skylights to the lower levels.
We also went into the Library on the 2nd floor which is available to the public from 8am-4pm. I wish I could have taken pictures, but they don't allow that in the EPA building. It was pretty cool. I did get an EPA tatoo. Here is some documentation I grabbed. Overall, I really enjoyed visiting the EPA Region 8 library.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
What is the future of academic publishing?
I have been reading A LOT lately about the demise of the newspaper business. Particularly interesting is Clay Shirky's take on the whole system -- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Thanks to 2009 M&S winner, Dorothea Salo, I found found history. This post has a good analysis that compares/contrasts the demise of the newspaper market with the academic publishing market. Tom Scheinfeldt said: "In our world, parallels to newspaper publishers can be made, for instance, with journal publishers or the purveyors of subscription research databases (indeed the three are often one and the same). I’m sure you can point to lots of others, and I’d be very happy to hear them in comments. But what interests me most in Shirky’s piece are his ideas about how the advent of the unthinkable divides a community of practitioners." Just what I have been thinking. The academic journal market is sinking like the Titanic. The established publishers do not want that cash cow ship to sink. The problem is that the cost of publishing truly has decreased, even though the big publishers say it costs $2,850 or $3,000 or somesuch figure to publish an article. The $3k is the cost with the existing broken journal system! They cannot image a future that does not have the "the brand of the journal which gives the imprimatur to the research article." To generalize a tad, older established researchers do indeed care about the name of the container of their articles, since that carries much of the weight for tenure purposes. They may ask -- "What is going to replace the newspaper industry/academic journal market? It can't go away because it is such a venerable institution." Therefore, it can't go away. But, as we have learned from Clay Shirky, newspapers are going away, and it may take some time for journalists to find another way to document the news and culture of the day. Journals and publishers (and societies) will start disappearing, and authors will find other channels to publish their thoughts, experimental results and ideas. Indeed, many physicists already have since 1991.
Many students (and some researchers) do not care about the name of the journal that houses the article. They care about the article itself. This viewpoint will continue to grow as they get older. More and more patrons will find articles through Google Scholar and other databases instead of browsing the current issues of Science, Nature, JACS or whatever.
Believe or not, my library is going through a cancellation discussion for the first time in 18 years. Our faculty and students have not had to worry about cancellations in quite some time. Thus, they have been shielded from the growing STM serials crisis. The faculty and the students are not the ones who pay the bill for the information. The library pays (well, the University actually) and the patrons are the ones who enjoy the benefits of the access to all of the subscriptions. This strange economic model has been well researched by Mark J. McCabe.
I wish I had time to read all of the 87+ books - and - reports that John Dupuis posted to his blog. I've already read a bunch, but there is so much great insight to be gleaned from all of these. (I wish I had more time to read...)
I imagine a future world where scholars post their work on websites/blogs -- it gets critiqued by a variety of scholars, and the articles get rated. The scholarly articles that get the highest ratings, citations and links get brought to the top of search results. As it stands now, articles do not HAVE to live within the imprimatur of a journal brand to have an impact. They can live on a website, in an IR, at a preprint server, etc. In the future, more and more and more scholarly articles will simply live on the net as stand-alone items without being housed in a journal. This is where the scholarly article market is headed.
Many students (and some researchers) do not care about the name of the journal that houses the article. They care about the article itself. This viewpoint will continue to grow as they get older. More and more patrons will find articles through Google Scholar and other databases instead of browsing the current issues of Science, Nature, JACS or whatever.
Believe or not, my library is going through a cancellation discussion for the first time in 18 years. Our faculty and students have not had to worry about cancellations in quite some time. Thus, they have been shielded from the growing STM serials crisis. The faculty and the students are not the ones who pay the bill for the information. The library pays (well, the University actually) and the patrons are the ones who enjoy the benefits of the access to all of the subscriptions. This strange economic model has been well researched by Mark J. McCabe.
I wish I had time to read all of the 87+ books - and - reports that John Dupuis posted to his blog. I've already read a bunch, but there is so much great insight to be gleaned from all of these. (I wish I had more time to read...)
I imagine a future world where scholars post their work on websites/blogs -- it gets critiqued by a variety of scholars, and the articles get rated. The scholarly articles that get the highest ratings, citations and links get brought to the top of search results. As it stands now, articles do not HAVE to live within the imprimatur of a journal brand to have an impact. They can live on a website, in an IR, at a preprint server, etc. In the future, more and more and more scholarly articles will simply live on the net as stand-alone items without being housed in a journal. This is where the scholarly article market is headed.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Gravitational Theory of FriendFeed
I propose the gravitational theory of FriendFeed. If a post has a small number of comments from some "big names", and the object is wandering in the right part of the universe at the right time of day, it will gather up some other interesting comments, which makes the post bigger, which gathers up a huge number of other comments.
When do the comments stop piling on? It is when the object wanders off into near empty space-time. The comments will also stop gathering on that object when another larger object comes into view, and people start commenting on more interesting "matters".
When do the comments stop piling on? It is when the object wanders off into near empty space-time. The comments will also stop gathering on that object when another larger object comes into view, and people start commenting on more interesting "matters".
Thursday, March 5, 2009
How the Library Camp of the West was put together
Steve, Laura and I just finished the preprint for a paper (submitted to Collaborative Librarianship) and we posted it to the RCLIS eprint server at http://eprints.rclis.org/15739/.
Abstract -- From July to October, 2008, Laura Crossett, Joseph Kraus and Steve Lawson organized the Library Camp of the West (http://librarycampwest.pbwiki.com/). This was an unconference that took place on October 10, 2008 at the University of Denver. The authors used many technology tools to organize the event, such as email, wikis, blogs, two tools from Google, the Doodle scheduling Website, Flickr and more. This article will explain how they used those tools to prepare for the unconference.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
My short review of the Age of Spiritual Machines
I came across this book (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) written in 1999 concerning the future of computing. Dr. Kurzweil has an interesting take on the future of computing and the human race. He sees things in a very positive light, and he is a very strong "strong AI" proponent. He had many specific predictions about the future of computing in 10 year increments. There are predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099. Since it is now 2009, I thought I would look at his predictions for 2009 to see how accurate they are. The synopsis of his predictions come from pages 277-278, but chapter nine (pages 189-201) covers the year 2009 in more detail.
"A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." This would be 1,000 Gigahertz computer. In looking at some Dell and Gateway desktop models that cost around $1,000, I see that they have processors such as a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor up to 3.33GHz or an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200 at 2.33GHz. This isn't exactly 1,000 GHz, but with the dual and quad processors, they may be effectively operating at much greater than a 3.33 or a 2.33 GHz single Intel processor. Processing power isn't as important as it used to be. Memory is also very important, and that is not addressed at all in his book. Also, the speed of the computer can depend on the operating system that is used.
"Personal Computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book." He kind of called this one, but wearable computers are not exactly in fashion these days, unless you consider an iPhone a wearable computer.
"Cables are disappearing. Communications between components use short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." Plenty of cables are still around, but WIFI and G3 is taking care of the Web access.
"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces." Ummmmmmmmmmm, no.
"Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often, the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." Well, we do make purchases and reservations online, but it is not with an animated virtual presence.
"Although traditional classroom organization is still common, intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning." We are not even close to being there. I think Dr. Kurzweil doesn't understand the political and social inertia that is in the public education system and in the college educational system. High quality educational software is pretty difficult to devise.
"Translating telephones (speech-to-speech language translation) are commonly used for many language pairs." Another no.
"Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the 20th century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply effective by the accelerating improvement in the price performance of computing." Well, no. However, how could he possibly have predicted the 9/11 bombings. The Tech bubble bursting in the early 2000's, and the economic and housing market collapse of the fall of 2008. We are in a stage of abundant over consumption, and humans need to learn not to consume so much and to save more.
"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians." Again no. But, I do find the word 'cybernetic' interesting. Haven't used that word in some time.
"Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases." I wish. As humans have gotten heavier, our heart problems have gotten worse. The war on cancer is still being waged.
"The neo-Luddite movement is growing." Another no. I see more and more people sharing their thoughts, ideas, images and videos using Web2.0 technology. We are seeing solutions to our problems being solved with crowd-sourced open-access software platforms.
Some other good reviews are at:
Fogel, David B., A true visionary's truly fantastic vision. IEEE Spectrum, (July 1999), Vol. 36 Issue 7, p9-10.
Casti, John L., Exit Homo sapiens, stage left. Nature (2/25/1999), Vol. 397 Issue 6721, p663-664.
Proudfoot, Diane, How Human Can They Get? Science (04/30/1999), Vol. 284 Issue 5415, p745.
"A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." This would be 1,000 Gigahertz computer. In looking at some Dell and Gateway desktop models that cost around $1,000, I see that they have processors such as a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor up to 3.33GHz or an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200 at 2.33GHz. This isn't exactly 1,000 GHz, but with the dual and quad processors, they may be effectively operating at much greater than a 3.33 or a 2.33 GHz single Intel processor. Processing power isn't as important as it used to be. Memory is also very important, and that is not addressed at all in his book. Also, the speed of the computer can depend on the operating system that is used.
"Personal Computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book." He kind of called this one, but wearable computers are not exactly in fashion these days, unless you consider an iPhone a wearable computer.
"Cables are disappearing. Communications between components use short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." Plenty of cables are still around, but WIFI and G3 is taking care of the Web access.
"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces." Ummmmmmmmmmm, no.
"Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often, the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." Well, we do make purchases and reservations online, but it is not with an animated virtual presence.
"Although traditional classroom organization is still common, intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning." We are not even close to being there. I think Dr. Kurzweil doesn't understand the political and social inertia that is in the public education system and in the college educational system. High quality educational software is pretty difficult to devise.
"Translating telephones (speech-to-speech language translation) are commonly used for many language pairs." Another no.
"Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the 20th century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply effective by the accelerating improvement in the price performance of computing." Well, no. However, how could he possibly have predicted the 9/11 bombings. The Tech bubble bursting in the early 2000's, and the economic and housing market collapse of the fall of 2008. We are in a stage of abundant over consumption, and humans need to learn not to consume so much and to save more.
"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians." Again no. But, I do find the word 'cybernetic' interesting. Haven't used that word in some time.
"Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases." I wish. As humans have gotten heavier, our heart problems have gotten worse. The war on cancer is still being waged.
"The neo-Luddite movement is growing." Another no. I see more and more people sharing their thoughts, ideas, images and videos using Web2.0 technology. We are seeing solutions to our problems being solved with crowd-sourced open-access software platforms.
Some other good reviews are at:
Fogel, David B., A true visionary's truly fantastic vision. IEEE Spectrum, (July 1999), Vol. 36 Issue 7, p9-10.
Casti, John L., Exit Homo sapiens, stage left. Nature (2/25/1999), Vol. 397 Issue 6721, p663-664.
Proudfoot, Diane, How Human Can They Get? Science (04/30/1999), Vol. 284 Issue 5415, p745.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Emerging Technology and Me
Created a video for a friend out at Western Oregon University...
Here is the video if you don't see it above.
Here is the video if you don't see it above.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
SCOAP3 stuff at ALA Midwinter
Saturday Morning, January 24th, 2009
Dr. Salvatore Mele (from the CERN Scientific Information Service) provided some background of the SCOAP3 project and the High Energy Physics (HEP) community in general. (More info on SCOAP3 can be found in the "Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics: Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party" report and in this ARL report, "The Audacity of SCOAP3".)
For the most part, the HEP community is divided in two parts, experimental and theoretical. He then talked a little about the LHC and the basics of Open Access (OA) publishing. About six journals (PRD, JHEP, PhysLettB, NucPhysB, PRL and EuroPhysJC) from four publishers provide about 80% of the peer-reviewed content. (This article provides some data -- "Quantitative analysis of the publishing landscape in high-energy physics.") The HEP community is international in scope.
He then describes the two major preprint archives. The arXiv hit a plateau in 1999 for preprint submits. About 90-95% of the peer-reviewed HEP articles are in arXiv.
A survey was given to researchers to see how they discovered articles in high energy physics. Over 2000 people responded. About 40% use arXiv and 49% use SPIRES. 82% preferred the arXiv version over the peer-reviewed journal article. The role of the journal is for peer review. They are the "Interface with officialdom".
OA journals are the natural evolution of publishing. Dr. Mele then describes three OA models: 1) hybrid 2) author pays and 3) institutional membership. he cites an exampled of seven OA articles that describe the construction of the LHC. They have 1,600 pages, 8,000 authors and 60,000 downloads.
He would like to see funding bodies and libraries contribute to SCOAP3 for the peer review service and for the long term management of the OA articles.
The HEP price tag for the peer reviewed articles is about $13 Million per year, at about $2,000 per article. The 6-8 HEP journals publish about 5-7,000 articles per yr.
Dr. Mele then described the SCOAP3 "tender". The HEP journals are ranked by a combination of high quality and low price. Some journals are left out because the funding can only support 6-8 journals, give or take. The funding will be up to $13 Million.
Features of the project:
* Meets the expectations of researchers, funders, librarians and publishers
* Countries pledge contribution
* In the United States, individual institutions and consortia can join
* $7.5m currently pledged out of the $13m that is needed.
* The US HEP share is only $3.5 Million.
Japan and China should contribute about $800,000 each. More money from a major country will be officially pledged next week.If you are interested in supporting the project, please fill out the "Expression of Interest" at www.tinyurl.com/scoap3us. It was noted that the institution could estimate the amount they would be able to support the project. See Question 11 of the form.
Once a large fraction of the $13 Million is pledged, then it can go forward. The following steps were liberated from http://www.bice.rm.cnr.it/Convegno_Open_Access/Mele.pdf
• Bodies which today buy HEP journals (libraries, consortia, institutes which finance them) estimate their current expenditure on the HEP journals targeted by SCOAP3.
• Partners pledge a re-direction of their current expenditure as their contribution to SCOAP3 through an Expression of Interest.
–A single partner (or a joint venture) partner pledges funds for an entire country, organizing the re-direction of subscriptions in that country
–In the U.S., decentralized funding means many partners each pledging their present expenditures
• Once a sizeable fraction of budget is pledged
–SCOAP3 formally established, with international governance
–SCOAP3 can issue a tender to publishers
• Publishers answer the tender, with agreement on:
1. Journal license packages are unbundled, the OA titles are removed and subscription prices are reduced accordingly
2. In the case of long-term subscription contracts, publishers will be required to reimburse subscription costs pertaining to OA journals
• SCOAP3 partners adjudicate contracts and commit funds
• Contracts with publisher are signed and funds are transferred toSCOAP3
• Aim to 3-year tendering cycle and funding in sliding windows
David Stern asked the question -- Why pay for all this when it was just demonstrated that the preprints were the most used and read by physicists? Dr. Mele responded with their need for the long term preservation of the peer-reviewed versions of the articles.
Sunday Morning, January 24th, 2009
The STS Vendor Session had a panel consisting of Dr. Salvatore Mele from CERN, Tony O'Rourke from IOP and Wim van der Stelt from Springer.
Dr. Mele provided another quick overview of the SCOAP3 project. No need to go into that again.
Tony O'Rourke discussed and tried to answer the following points:
Do learned societies want Open Access? (The short answer is yes because it creates greater visibility for the society and their publications.) The use and citations of IOP publications are increasing. Authors and institutions are not enthusiastic about paying subscriptions and fees for journals and their articles. The OA New Journal of Physics was launched in 1997, and that has been very successful, but it still needs a subsidy. The Journal of Physics: Conference Series was launched in 2004. NJP averages about 700 downloads per article, and there have been millions of downloads total.
The Journal of High Energy Physics has been published since 1997, but SISSA stopped funding the journal since 2002. The IOP now hosts the journal.
What is the definition of sustainability in publishing? The British Library definition is 200-300 years, and the IOP agrees with that assessment.
Researchers want VIP for their publications. VIP = visibility, impact and prestige.
Wim van der Stelt discussed the Springer perspective on OA. Is SCOAP3 sustainable?
He provides some background of Springer. (~1,800 journals, 5,500 books a year.) Springer provides authors with the option for OA with their "OA Choice" program. Authors can pay about $3,000 (2,000 Euro) for AO in any of their journals. He discussed the arrangements Springer has made with the California Digital Library, Max Planck Institute, a Dutch library system, and some others. Springer bought out BioMed Central because it is a good platform for OA publishing.
Questions and comments from the audience
Is the tender process transparent and public? The terms for "tender" are not clear at this point. Unbundling of the journals (and figuring out their value and price) can be difficult or impossible for librarians. Is each subject community going to have to do this? Librarians don't want to see dozens of silos for each subject community. Dr. Mele noted that this is an experiment, and it might as well start with the HEP community.
Dr. Salvatore Mele (from the CERN Scientific Information Service) provided some background of the SCOAP3 project and the High Energy Physics (HEP) community in general. (More info on SCOAP3 can be found in the "Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics: Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party" report and in this ARL report, "The Audacity of SCOAP3".)
For the most part, the HEP community is divided in two parts, experimental and theoretical. He then talked a little about the LHC and the basics of Open Access (OA) publishing. About six journals (PRD, JHEP, PhysLettB, NucPhysB, PRL and EuroPhysJC) from four publishers provide about 80% of the peer-reviewed content. (This article provides some data -- "Quantitative analysis of the publishing landscape in high-energy physics.") The HEP community is international in scope.
He then describes the two major preprint archives. The arXiv hit a plateau in 1999 for preprint submits. About 90-95% of the peer-reviewed HEP articles are in arXiv.
A survey was given to researchers to see how they discovered articles in high energy physics. Over 2000 people responded. About 40% use arXiv and 49% use SPIRES. 82% preferred the arXiv version over the peer-reviewed journal article. The role of the journal is for peer review. They are the "Interface with officialdom".
OA journals are the natural evolution of publishing. Dr. Mele then describes three OA models: 1) hybrid 2) author pays and 3) institutional membership. he cites an exampled of seven OA articles that describe the construction of the LHC. They have 1,600 pages, 8,000 authors and 60,000 downloads.
He would like to see funding bodies and libraries contribute to SCOAP3 for the peer review service and for the long term management of the OA articles.
The HEP price tag for the peer reviewed articles is about $13 Million per year, at about $2,000 per article. The 6-8 HEP journals publish about 5-7,000 articles per yr.
Dr. Mele then described the SCOAP3 "tender". The HEP journals are ranked by a combination of high quality and low price. Some journals are left out because the funding can only support 6-8 journals, give or take. The funding will be up to $13 Million.
Features of the project:
* Meets the expectations of researchers, funders, librarians and publishers
* Countries pledge contribution
* In the United States, individual institutions and consortia can join
* $7.5m currently pledged out of the $13m that is needed.
* The US HEP share is only $3.5 Million.
Japan and China should contribute about $800,000 each. More money from a major country will be officially pledged next week.If you are interested in supporting the project, please fill out the "Expression of Interest" at www.tinyurl.com/scoap3us. It was noted that the institution could estimate the amount they would be able to support the project. See Question 11 of the form.
Once a large fraction of the $13 Million is pledged, then it can go forward. The following steps were liberated from http://www.bice.rm.cnr.it/Convegno_Open_Access/Mele.pdf
• Bodies which today buy HEP journals (libraries, consortia, institutes which finance them) estimate their current expenditure on the HEP journals targeted by SCOAP3.
• Partners pledge a re-direction of their current expenditure as their contribution to SCOAP3 through an Expression of Interest.
–A single partner (or a joint venture) partner pledges funds for an entire country, organizing the re-direction of subscriptions in that country
–In the U.S., decentralized funding means many partners each pledging their present expenditures
• Once a sizeable fraction of budget is pledged
–SCOAP3 formally established, with international governance
–SCOAP3 can issue a tender to publishers
• Publishers answer the tender, with agreement on:
1. Journal license packages are unbundled, the OA titles are removed and subscription prices are reduced accordingly
2. In the case of long-term subscription contracts, publishers will be required to reimburse subscription costs pertaining to OA journals
• SCOAP3 partners adjudicate contracts and commit funds
• Contracts with publisher are signed and funds are transferred toSCOAP3
• Aim to 3-year tendering cycle and funding in sliding windows
David Stern asked the question -- Why pay for all this when it was just demonstrated that the preprints were the most used and read by physicists? Dr. Mele responded with their need for the long term preservation of the peer-reviewed versions of the articles.
Sunday Morning, January 24th, 2009
The STS Vendor Session had a panel consisting of Dr. Salvatore Mele from CERN, Tony O'Rourke from IOP and Wim van der Stelt from Springer.
Dr. Mele provided another quick overview of the SCOAP3 project. No need to go into that again.
Tony O'Rourke discussed and tried to answer the following points:
Do learned societies want Open Access? (The short answer is yes because it creates greater visibility for the society and their publications.) The use and citations of IOP publications are increasing. Authors and institutions are not enthusiastic about paying subscriptions and fees for journals and their articles. The OA New Journal of Physics was launched in 1997, and that has been very successful, but it still needs a subsidy. The Journal of Physics: Conference Series was launched in 2004. NJP averages about 700 downloads per article, and there have been millions of downloads total.
The Journal of High Energy Physics has been published since 1997, but SISSA stopped funding the journal since 2002. The IOP now hosts the journal.
What is the definition of sustainability in publishing? The British Library definition is 200-300 years, and the IOP agrees with that assessment.
Researchers want VIP for their publications. VIP = visibility, impact and prestige.
Wim van der Stelt discussed the Springer perspective on OA. Is SCOAP3 sustainable?
He provides some background of Springer. (~1,800 journals, 5,500 books a year.) Springer provides authors with the option for OA with their "OA Choice" program. Authors can pay about $3,000 (2,000 Euro) for AO in any of their journals. He discussed the arrangements Springer has made with the California Digital Library, Max Planck Institute, a Dutch library system, and some others. Springer bought out BioMed Central because it is a good platform for OA publishing.
Questions and comments from the audience
Is the tender process transparent and public? The terms for "tender" are not clear at this point. Unbundling of the journals (and figuring out their value and price) can be difficult or impossible for librarians. Is each subject community going to have to do this? Librarians don't want to see dozens of silos for each subject community. Dr. Mele noted that this is an experiment, and it might as well start with the HEP community.
Video from the STS Dinner
Here is the video from the STS Dinner at the 2009 ALA Midwinter Conference in Denver. It was taken Sunday night, January 25th, 2009. Virginia Baldwin thanks IOP Publishing for sponsoring the dinner.
Creative Commons Launches Study of “Noncommercial Use”
From their website -- "The nonprofit organization Creative Commons has launched a research study that will explore differences between commercial and noncommercial uses of content, as those uses are understood among various communities and in connection with a wide variety of content. Generous support for the study has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."
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