* The Power Point presentations of the ALCTS CMDS Collection Development & Electronic Resources Committee's (CDER) program at ALA (“Sunday 1.30pm-> 3.30pm” on the online program) on “Making the Switch from Print to Online: Why, When and How?.”

 * Phil Davis and several colleagues at Cornell have conducted a rigorous randomized controlled trial of articles in the 11 journals of the American Physiological Society to study how open access affects article downloads and citations. The key findings are that while downloads increased, citations did not within the first year following publication. The article is available in the BMJ.

 * A recent report by Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner on How readers navigate scholarly content is now available and provides a comparison with a previous study in 2005 noting essential changes.

 * Further work conducted at LISU on behalf of Oxford University press compares and articulates trends in journal pricing from 2000 to 2006 for biomedical and social science journals. The executive summary is available here and a full report on the findings was published in the July 2008 issue of Learned Publishing (subscription required).

 Understanding Open Access in the academic environment: A guide for Authors by Pappalardo from the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project concludes that “Proper rights management is essentially about understanding which rights are important to you to retain and which rights you are willing to grant to others (and on what basis), and then employing the best mechanism to grant those rights.”€� The 151pp report published as an e-print is a comprehensive guide speaking firmly for OA and dealing in depth with the associated rights issues.

 For all of us interested in the changes to University Press publishing an article in the latest Mellon Foundation Annual Report is essential reading. The article confirms that US University Presses account for 5% of books published and 1.3% of book sales based on the latest available data. “University presses thus are creatures that are both distinguished and limited by the particular niche they occupy.” The Mellon Foundation intends “to encourage experimentation in response to clearly identified needs in the (university press) system.”€�

 Although the devil as always is in the detail, key findings of the ebrary sponsored 2008 Global Student E-book Survey include the following:

• On research or class assignments, e-book usage is on par with print books, with almost equal numbers of students using each type.
• Fifty-one percent of students would “very often or often” opt to use electronic versions of books over print versions, compared to 32% who “sometimes” prefer e-books and 17% who always use the print version.
• E-books rank among the top resources students consider trustworthy, along with print materials such as books, textbooks, reference (dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps), and journals.

 The annual Society for Scholarly Publishers (SSP) meeting in Boston in 2008 included many interesting sessions on “Inventing the future of scholarly publishing” essentially the impact and outcomes of so-called web 2.0. A summary of the meeting is available here but a small list of think points drawn from this meeting for consideration follow:

• Be very clear about access rights and policies and work with and support community platforms.
• Content portals position a publisher for the article economy and give the opportunity to experiment further with access models.
• Before investing in virtual online venues, investigate where customers hold accounts and what they are doing on existing sites - lectures and conferences are most profitable and popular so far.
• Handling reviewers is becoming one of the biggest if not the biggest challenge facing editorial offices.

 Much discussion within publishing focuses on the broad global market for information. Here are two recent developments which provide practical evidence of this powerful publishing trend:

• Web of Science from Thomson Reuters is increasing its coverage of regionally published journals by adding a further 700 from outside the usually strong journal publishing countries. These journals are typically published outside the US or UK. Their content often centers on topics of regional interest or that are presented with a regional perspective. Authors may be largely from the region rather than an internationally diverse group.
• As a specific example of a country making policy changes to effect research publications, the South African Academy of Science has developed a series of recommendations.

 ALPSP has published a report on Author - perceived quality characteristics of STM journals.

 How often do economists self-archive? By Bergstrom TC, Lavaty R. (2007). The article answers some thorny questions such as can subscription-based journals survive if self-archiving becomes much more widespread? The authors analyze a portion of the journal literature in economics compared with political science for evidence of the impact of self-archiving. The article concludes with the statement - “the benefits of self-archiving to the academic community are twofold. There is the direct effect of making a greater portion of the body of research available to scholars everywhere and the secondary effect of reducing the prices charged by publishers who exploit their monopoly power.”

 Open access and openly accessible: a study of scientific publications shared via the Internet published in the BMJ by JD Wren. The article examines the posting of journal reprints on non-journal web sites and compares posting trends between open access and subscription based journal articles . The broad conclusion is that the higher the impact of the publishing journal and the more recent the article, the more likely it is that the article can be found online at a non-journal web site.

 Following the vote passed at Harvard for university ownership and distribution of research papers (February 2008) three publishing organizations - STM, PSP and ALPSP have joined forces to issue a statement about publishing agreements which is essential reading.

 An interesting overview of the discussions and frustrations surrounding Wikipedia operations from The Economist. The comments on this article (link at end of article text) are well worth reading too.

 Watch out for the discussions that are emerging from all quarters on the impact of publishing activities on the environment. This green initiative is likely to be broad and important so be prepared to demonstrate a neutral carbon impact as Wiley Blackwell does.

 An initiative to reduce the repetition of peer-review of the same manuscript within a community is being pursued by BioMed Central. The Neuroscience peer review consortium journals “…accept manuscript reviews from other Consortium journals. By reducing the number of times that a manuscript is reviewed, the Consortium will increase the speed of publication of research results, and lessen the burden on both authors and reviewers alike.”

 SERU: A Shared electronic Resource Understanding should help smaller publishers (and libraries) with limited resources sell electronic resources into US academic libraries.

 A CIBER research behavior study commissioned by the British Library sets out to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. Interesting reading throughout - and see the chart below from this study which provides one benchmark of researcher behavior by age in 2007 and the findings “..suggest that the shift away from the physical to the virtual library will accelerate very rapidly and that tools like Google Scholar will be increasingly a real and present threat to the library as an institution.”

 Taking a cue from the music business, Harper Collins has begun selling the individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand for bite-size portions of digital texts.

 An article entitled Face Value by Barbara Fister draws parallels between the principles of social networking sites such as Facebook, and the scholarly communications system, each relying on the free donation of time and effort, adding gloomily that “But we’ve barely begun to examine the unintended consequences of the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through privately owned digital domains of the public sphere.”

 TropiKA.net, launched in October 2007, is an important global initiative where I helped WHO/TDR to clarify their publishing strategy and then to define the key elements of this innovative online service using a number of research tools. As you can see from the site, TropIKA is designed to enhance access and to share essential knowledge with health researchers and policy makers dedicated to improving the control of the main infectious diseases of poverty.

 Note that Ingenta has partnered with Baynote to provide an article recommendation service that is similar to the large consumer sites. According to the Baynote site, “recommendations are automatic suggestions given to web site users that help them find products or content they like or need. It works with any type of content: products, articles, PDFs, videos, advertising, and more. Think of it as Amazon's suggestion system that is now available for any business web site.”

 The American Institute of Physics is slicing and dicing its publications in an interesting way now offering the option of subscribing to specific sections of two of its journals. Applied Physics Reviews comprises the review articles from Journal of Applied Physics. JCP: Biochemical Physics is made up of the articles published in The Journal of Chemical Physics that directly deal with, or have important implications for, biologically related systems; content is published online daily. Presumably the option of subscribing to a particular subset of the content of these journals will be attractive to institutional libraries that may not want to subscribe to the complete journals.

 An editorial in Nature Genetics in 2007 written by the first Editor Kevin Davies describes the exciting events surrounding hatching of this first Nature spin-off journal in 1992 which went on to be so highly successful, and the first of many.

 David Prosser’s recent article Public policy and the politics of Open Access provides a helpful overview of the public policy drivers that are affecting scholarly communications and describes the major policy initiatives that are supporting a move to open access.

 An article describing a concept that has been around for over 5 years Publishing cooperatives: an alternative for non-profit publishers describes how publishing cooperatives can provide a scalable publishing model that provides a practical financial framework capable of building and sustaining society publishing programs. However, the practical issue here is who and how will such cooperatives form?

 The OECD has published Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding. The principles set out to increase return on public investments in research through effective access to research. Core principles which are central and important are Openness, Flexibility, Transparency, Legal conformity, Protection of intellectual property, Formal responsibility, Professionalism, Interoperability, Quality, Security, Efficiency, Accountability and Sustainability

 The Annual Periodical Pricing survey is a reminder of some of the conundrums in journal pricing as it presents ‘average’ prices by discipline. This year the focus of the text is on the further impact of Open Access and whether, and how, it is taking hold.

 The OECD Council has come out with a lengthy and specific set of recommendations on access to research data from public funding which clearly articulates a policy position and makes clear the differences between publicly and privately funded research data. It goes on to include a set of guidelines and principles which are well worth reading.

 PLoS One launched in beta version recently, and three months in has published over 800 articles across a broad array of biomedical and medical topics (go to “Explore by Subject” on the Home page for a running total of articles by field). A March 2007 article on Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate is especially relevant to publishers. 

 Following feedback from the Customer Service Briefing Session at the 2006 Conference, the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) collected publishers' pricing announcements to simplify the renewals process for serials librarians worldwide by providing a central look-up point. The list to date is available at: http://www.uksg.org/pricelists.asp and there is a link for all publishers not currently included to add their details.

 Beware of reports on reports! The report published by the UK Research Information Network entitled UK Scholarly Journals 2006 Baseline report claims to be “as authoritative a base of evidence as can currently be constructed” According to the RIN web site an expert panel was assembled to ‘rigorously check the data and conclusions presented to them’. In the sections that deal with my own work for JISC in 2005 notably in Area 2 of the report: Journal supply-side economics, there are a number of errors of fact and analysis ranging from over-simplified and thus meaningless views of numbers and costs derived from my report, to an incomplete description of the disciplines covered and inaccurate statements about the publishers’ data included in the report. A member of the expert panel commented to me “...we did not review every piece of evidence in detail and so unfortunately may have missed some issues.” So when you need to refer to the report, go back to the original sources for accurate figures, as I expect my report is not the only one poorly represented.

 A brief summary of the author-side payments implemented in the past year or so by the largest commercial publishers as they experiment with Open Access to primary research articles through hybrid OA models. Notice the different names given below to each of the programs offered by these publishers.

 For a quick overview of the information industry take a look at the Outsell report Information Industry Outlook 2007 which predicts that STM publishing will grow by some 7% in 2006. In addition note Outsell’s observation that “STM publishers are increasingly ...incorporating content and tools, to offer slices of content to answer questions or add analysis...that make it more useful in very specific situations”.

 Who reads your online text? Jakob Nielsen's recent Alertbox presents the results of some Eye-tracking Behavior studies which show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. No great surprises it is but worth noting that users will not read text thoroughly so when writing for the Web:

• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information
• The start of sub-headings, paragraphs and bullet points are most effective if they use information carrying words

Conversely, for scholarly publishers it may not be eyes at all that read the text you publish. In a Chapter from a book to be published soon (and to which I also contributed a Chapter) Cliff Lynch asks some key questions about how information is being read: "As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all of our assumptions that this literature is only read, and read only by human beings, one article at a time? What is needed to permit the creation of digital libraries hosting these materials that moves beyond the "incunabular" view of the literature, to use Greg Crane's very provocative recent characterization? What is needed to allow the application of computational technologies to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from collections of scholarly literature?"

 An informative article “Strategies for developing sustainable OA scholarly journals” by D. J. Solomon includes some first hand tips on keeping an Open Access journal going as it gets more successful.

 An article from Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger Schonfeld includes some of the results of a study I completed for Portico (an entity of the Mellon Foundation) in 2005 and explains the challenges facing smaller publishers who now need to adjust their business models to fully accommodate the print to online transition.

 OECD have published a report on scientific publishing which sets out to analyze the drivers for change within the system. Development of new business models is seen as putting “scientific publishing at the forefront of the development of new digital content business models”. It also recognizes that “Publishing is ..a significant economic activity”. The report is well worth reading for a detached view of scientific publishing seen through the lens of what actions and policies will increase the overall productivity of nations.

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