Mark Ware Consulting has been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (www.knowledge-exchange.info), a partnership of JISC (UK), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark) and DfG (Germany), to conduct a study into the feasibility of submission fees in open access journals (i.e. as distinct from publication fees).

An open access business model based on submission charges could have real advantages over OA based (solely) on publication charges. For example, at present and under gold OA, authors have an incentive to submit their paper to an unrealistically prestigious journal or conference, since there is no cost to them, their paper might be accepted, and even if it is not, they will receive good feedback from senior reviewers. They can then re-submit the paper to less and less prestigious journals or conferences until it is accepted. There is little cost to them but great cost to the wider scholarly communications community. An approach based on submission charges may also introduce a greater level of competition into the scholarly communication domain by more closely relating payments to services provided. It might also provide a better OA model for high-rejection-rate journals where otherwise the publication charge has to cover the costs of peer review of all the rejected papers.

There may be, however, risks in a model based on submission charges, for example funders may find it difficult to develop an acceptable mechanism to limit the payments they are called on to make. For their part, publishers may be reluctant to deter potential authors by introducing a fee not required by their competitors.

There has been some discussion of this model in the past, for instance in the Wellcome Trust 2004 report Costs and business models in scientific research publishing, while in October last year Gavin Baker raised the topic on his blog post Submission fees: a means of defraying costs for OA journals?, and more recently there was some discussion on the liblicense listserv.

The study will involve reviewing the literature and looking at the past experience of journals using submission charges, and then exploring possible models and testing these through consultation with major stakeholders including research funders, publishers, libraries and infrastructure providers, universities and researchers (as editors, peer reviewers, readers and authors).

At this stage we would be very pleased to hear from anyone with an interest in this topic.

STM has just released The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing.

A follow up to my 2006 report, Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments, this new report collects the available evidence and provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication.

The Publishing Research Consortium has published a new report by Mark Ware Consulting today:

Access by UK small and medium-sized enterprises to professional and academic information

From the press release (pdf):

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with 250 employees or fewer, make up 99.9% of UK businesses, and represent 59% of private sector employment and 52% of turnover. The latest study from the Publishing Research Consortium shows that staff in high-tech SMEs in the UK value research articles even more highly, and read more of them, than do those in larger businesses.

… Of those who considered information to be an important success factor for their organisation, 71% found access to research articles ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ (compared with 82% in larger businesses and 94% in higher education), while 29% felt it was ‘fairly difficult’ or ‘very difficult’; 60% felt it was easier than five years ago.

Despite this, more than half had experienced some recent difficulty in obtaining one or more articles; although they use a wide range of access channels, they find pay-per-view (PPV) costly and difficult, and ‘walk-in’ access at a local university inconvenient.

The report goes on to consider some suggestions for improving access for SMEs.

I will be presenting the results of the study at an extra session at the ALPSP Annual Conference at 5.30 on Thursday 10 September (slides).

Against The Grain, a US-based newsletter, has its special issue on peer review out now.

It includes an article by me, Current Peer Review Practice and Perceptions: The View from the Field. It’s not currently available online but I’ll be putting up a preprint version shortly.

Other articles include Peer Review: The History, the Issues, and New Directions by Irving Rockwood (who also edited the issue); PLoS ONE: New Approaches and Initiatives in the Evolution of the Academic Journal, by Peter Binfield; Interactive Open Access Peer Review: The Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Model, by Ulrich Pöschl; The Open Scholarship Full Disclosure Initiative: A Subversive Proposal, by Gary Hall; and The Odd Case of Book Reviews, by David Shatz.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I am working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on the development of a web-based toolkit for scholarly communications in the UK.

We have now launched a blog for the project which can be found here: http://rinsc.wordpress.com/

We plan to use the blog to post our research findings as they develop, gather data and documents and to solicit feedback as the project progresses towards implementing the toolkit.

Technorati Tags: Institutional repositories, Libraries, Online publishing, Open Access, Web2.0

Probably old news for most, but the Library Journal annual survey by Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born is as good this year as ever: Reality Bites: Periodicals Price Survey 2009 (Library Journal, 15 April 2009).

The authors are very pessimistic on the impact of the global recession and the prospect for library cuts. They report ARL saying that most of its 123 libraries will lose funding in 2010. Cuts are estimated at 5-15% for FY10, with the same or higher in FY11, and possibly cuts in FY12 and beyond.

The article also covers open access, reporting that over half of NIH-funded articles are now getting deposited in PubMedCentral, with 400,000 users accessing 700,000 articles each day; Orsdel & Born don’t think the “Fair Copyright” Act will get passed but also say it’s unlikely Obama would sign it into law even if it were passed.

Consortia deals and bundles continue to be the dominant business model – libraries now acquire more than half of their content in bundles of 50 titles or more.

Finally, the authors describe as a “startling twist” Outsell’s Nov 2008 analysis that suggested that simply having the content wouldn’t be enough, and that the future of subscriptions would be in providing workflow tools and services to help users manage the existing ocean of information. Since Outsell (and others) have been predicting the importance of workflow solutions since at least 2002 it’s hard to see what’s startling about it, but it’s certainly an important trend. It’s also another trend (like consortia big deals) that favours large publishers (who can afford to invest in workflow technology and have a breadth of content to underpin it), potentially at the expense of smaller, society publishers. Some 25% of Thomson revenues now come from software-based products, according to this article by David Worlock of Outsell from 2007, which sees workflow integration as a potential disruptive technology.

Technorati Tags: Libraries, Open Access

We’ve been awarded a contract to develop a web-based toolkit to support key stakeholders (especially research funders, higher education institutions, libraries and publishers) to apply the common principles set out in an earlier RIN document, the Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy.

I’m working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on this project, which will run from March to November 2009.

The toolkit will provide guidance to relevant stakeholders in relation to each principle constituting the statement of principles, and their roles in applying them. It will encourage reflection on how the agendas of different stakeholders might be aligned behind common goals and conflicts of interests resolved.

In practice, I think this means we will need to create some community around the project if it is to live and grow beyond the initial design. So we’re looking for ideas on how to create online communities around projects. 

We’re currently in a research and consultation phase, surveying and interviewing people from across the scholarly communications spectrum. 

I’ll shortly create a separate blog for the project – watch this space for an announcement.

I’ve posted a new article on Web 2.0 and scholarly communication

This was originally intended for Learned Publishing but they found it too journalistic for their style, and it also overlapped with other articles already in the pipeline. It’s possible I may expand the last section, We built it, why won’t they come?, into an opinion piece, but in the meantime I hope it may be a useful overview of developments for some people.

Topics covered include:

• What is Web 2.0?
• Web 1.0 and scholarly communication
• Web 2.0 and Open Access
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Podcasts
• Wikis
• Data
• Peer review
• Reasons for lack of uptake to date

Read more here …

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Science 2.0, Semantic web, Web2.0

At last! a definition of semantic publishing I can understand and that tells me why I might want to bother:

anything that enhances the meaning of a published journal article, facilitates its automated discovery, enables its linking to semantically related articles, provides access to data within the article in actionable form, or facilitates integration of data between papers. Among other things, it involves enriching the article with appropriate metadata that are amenable to automated processing and analysis, allowing enhanced verifiability of published information and providing the capacity for automated discovery and summarization.

From David Shotton’s excellent article Semantic publishing: the coming revolution in scientific journal publishing, in the April Learned Publishing doi:10.1087/2009202

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Semantic web, Web2.0

[Update: the new version has now been released: see The STM Report]

I’m about to start an update/revision of the “Scientific Publishing in Transition” paper I wrote for ALPSP/STM in 2006, which attempted to provide an overview of journals publishing issues with data taken from published papers and reports etc.

Obviously there’s been a lot of developments in the last three years. If anyone would like to suggest topics and/or published papers, reports etc. that should be covered in the new edition I’d be very grateful for the suggestions. Similarly, any suggested corrections or amendments to the existing text would be welcome.

In the interests of open discussion I’m suggesting responses could be posted as comments to this blog entry, thus collecting them together in one place. But straight responses to the list or private emails to me are equally welcome!

The JISC-funded report “Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits” by John Houghton et al. was released today:

– press release
– full report (pdf)

From the report:

A reduction of revenue to the publishing industry, should it arise, would imply a reduction of activity and employment in the industry. Such adjustments are difficult for those concerned, but an economy is a dynamic system and, over the business cycle, is likely to achieve something close to ‘full employment’. As a result, the capital and labour no longer employed in publishing would be employed in an alternative activity. Given the relative size of the publishing industry and the rate at which alternative publishing models are being adopted, it is unlikely that the UK economy would have difficulty adjusting to such a change

Technorati Tags: Institutional repositories, Open Access

Enjoyed this:

Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin? – the winner of the synchroblogging contest:
Today is PLoS ONE’s second anniversary and we’re celebrating by announcing that the winner of the second PLoS synchroblogging competition is SciCurious of the Neurotopia 2.0 blog.
“This fluent post captures the essence of the research and accurately communicates it in a style that resonates with both the scientific and lay community” – Liz Allen, PLoS.
Here is the winning entry, cross posted in its entirety:
====================
Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin?
I already wrote one entry for PLoS ONE’s second birthday, but I’m feeling sparky today, and I think I like this paper better.
I don’t know about you guys, but when I was a sprog, my parents dragged me to music lessons. LOTS of music lessons. As of right now, I have been producing music of some type for the past 21 years straight. And I LOVE it.
Of course, I didn’t always love it. I remember my mother dragging me and my brother to lessons, making us sit down every day and practice (I was, and still am, no good with the practicing), and the fear and shakiness of recitals (heck, I still get that, and it’s been 21 years). In her time, Sci has actually “mastered” (it’s a debatable point), three different instruments (‘instruments’ is a loose term), and still uses one of them professionally on occasion. And if you can guess what they are, Sci will…do something cool. Like send you one of her favorite books. Or perhaps a tshirt with a molecule on it. Or perhaps some of her delicious cookies. Obviously, you can only guess if you don’t KNOW already (that means you, Dad). So there you go, contest open.
Anyway, years and years of music lessons. But the question is: did they do me any good? Does playing ‘Baby Mozart’ really do anything, and is anything achieved by starting your child on Suzuki when they are 2, other than the pain and misery of your child, and possibly an eventual love of music? Can it, perhaps, make me SMARTER?
Forgeard et al. “Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning” PLoS ONE, 2008.
And for the record, Einstein did play the violin. Apparently he was quite good.
There actually are several studies out there that show that techniques that you learn can “transfer” to other techniques, giving you a bit of an edge. This works best when you’re performing skills that are very similar to each other (like learning how to estimate the area of a square, and then learning how to estimate the area of a triangle). We know this happens for musicians in the development of fine motor skills. Once you’ve been playing the violin for a while, other things that require fine motor skills will come to you a bit easier (perhaps we should train all would-be surgeons on musical instruments, if you can master playing Rachmaninoff, brain surgery should be a piece of cake).
Of course, most of the studies that have been done are correlational in nature. Kids who play musical instruments have better motor skills. This could be due to the music, or the kids could play music because they have good motor skills. Good motor skills could be a development of things like the higher socio-economic class that often goes along with being taught music as a child, and thus parents are maybe able to put more effort to their development. The possibilities go on. Correlation is NOT causation.
The same thing goes for the correlation between musical learning and IQ. There was a modest correlation, but it could be just the effect of the extra lessons the kids were receiving, resulting in more time spent on focused attention and mastering a skill. Significant correlations have also been shown for music and verbal and language skills. Music lessons have been found to be correlated with increases in reading ability and phonetic comprehension. This actually leads me to a question: if language, reading, and phonetic comprehension are related to the pitch and tone of words, do children who are tone deaf have a harder time mastering reading and verbal skills? I think this might warrant a future PubMed search.
Unfortunately, all the previous tests tended to focus on the “transfer” of skills to not very related fields, like IQ. So in this study, the authors wanted to look at the effects of music learning on “near” transfers, skill closely related to music training: spatial reasoning, verbal abilities, nonverbal, and mathematical. They also looked for VERY closely related skills: fine motor control and auditory skill.
They grabbed a whole bunch of kids around 8-11 years old. Some played musical instruments, some didn’t (one of the problems with this study to me is that the control group is a good bit small than the instrumental group, 41 musicians vs 18 non). Kids were controlled for the socio-economic class of the parents. Average length of music training was close to five years. They also divided the kids up by whether or not they got Suzuki training, but ended up grouping them together, as Suzuki effects were no different from other instrumentalists.
Dang, they didn’t graph their data. Well, I shall fix. Because I can. People should be so grateful I do all their graphing…

There you go. So, as you can see from the graph (the pretty, pretty graph), musical kids scored a lot better on fine motor skills for left and right hand (the first two sets of bars). This is pretty expected, if you’re using fine motor skills a lot, presumably you’ll get better at them. The musical kids also did better when distinguishing tones and following melody lines, though interestingly, they didn’t show any improvements in rhythm. I wonder if this has anything to do with the kids of music the kids were studying. There wasn’t a single drummer in the bunch, it was all either piano or stringed instruments.
And finally, the kids with musical training scored a lot better (I know it doesn’t look like it, but the MANCOVA analysis uncovered a difference) on vocabulary testing. They outperformed their non-musical counterparts in both verbal ability (vocabulary) and non-verbal reasoning skills. They didn’t find any differences in math or spatial reasoning.
The authors hypothesize that music training may transfer skills to some other related domains. The other hypothesis is that music training doesn’t enhance a specific skill set, but rather your general intellectual ability. This would mean they would score higher on every test given. In fact, they DID score higher, but most of the time the scores didn’t reach significance.
Still, remember this is correlation, not causation. Families were of similar socio-ecoomic class and education, but that doesn’t mean they are all similar parents. Kids who take music lessons may have parents that are more involved in their intellectual development. Kids that persist in taking music lessons for a good chunk of time may have superior motivation. Correlation =/= causation.
But it’s still a cool paper, and no matter what, it’s quite clear that music lessons didn’t HURT. Time to tape your poor child to the piano bench!
Marie Forgeard, Ellen Winner, Andrea Norton, Gottfried Schlaug (2008). Practicing a Musical Instrument in Childhood is Associated with Enhanced Verbal Ability and Nonverbal Reasoning PLoS ONE, 3 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003566

A New York Times story from last week:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance

The key issue is the terms of Google & Microsoft deals that prevent making the scanned material available to other commercial search services. Google pays the scanning costs (estimated by NYT to be $30 per book) whereas the libraries have to share the costs if they go with OCA.

Technorati Tags: Google, Libraries, Open Access, Rights

As reported in the Library Journal:

The Max Planck Society (MPS), a major German research organization, issued a strongly worded statement this week to announce it was cancelling access to Springer’s online collection of journals over pricing. The cancellation will take effect as of December 31, 2007. MPS Vice President Kurt Mehlhorn said negotiations to extend the deal failed because, according to an MPS evaluation based on factors including usage and comparisons with other publishers, Springer was intent on charging “approximately double the price” the organization regarded as “reasonable.” …

Heise Online explains:

The failure of the talks means that the various institutes will soon no longer be able to access the common pool of scientific literature via the research surface by the name of SpringerLink that the publishing house provides. The Society will now with the institutes most affected attempt to work out a strategy whereby the supply of indispensable scientific content can be ensure in a cost-effective way. Because the subscriptions taken out in 1997 included the electronic archive rights, which according to the contract stay in force beyond the termination of the same, the scientists will, however, continue to enjoy online access to the paid-for, older volumes of the journals.

In other words, the “Big Deal” arrangements have been cancelled but the underlying subscriptions continue. This isn’t the first such cancellation (and unlikely to be the last) but it is a high-profile row and must be embarrassing to Springer in its original home territory.

Technorati Tags: Springer