10:15-11:00 Monday 20 October 2008 Grille # 1: TheScientificWorldJOURNAL

10:15-11:00 Monday 20 October 2008

Grille #1: TheScientificWorldJOURNAL

Graham Vaughan Lees, PhDFounding Editor & Publisherem: [email protected]: http://www.thescientificworld.com

tel: +358-400-440-374

Skype: gvlees

Chair: Markus Brammer, LLM

German National Library of Science & Technology

(TIB)

10TH EUROPEAN ICOLC FALL MEETING 2008

Introduction – apologies to ECSP 1 & 2 participants• Who am I?

• Neuroscientist, ex-Elsevier (Brain Research - online 1982+), ex-Raven Press (books), ex-Academic Press (JMB on-line 1995; IDEAL)

• What am I going to talk about?

• The Business of Scientific Publishing • How to make a small fortune from Science Publishing

• TheScientificWorldJOURNAL

• Open Access & Open Choice

• Knowledge Exchange

• Advantages & Challenges

• PubMedCentral

• Impact Factors (if time permits)

It is not all about Open Access • What we are not here to discuss is the Open Access

movement, but it is an important issue, and we cannot ignore it, so …

• The argument that taxpayers pay for the research so the results of it should be available to all is seductive, but rather specious

• There is nothing inherently wrong with having a strong private sector commercially successful science publishing industry

• Societies rely on journal income, and even commercial publishers’ employees are decent well-educated folk who rely on the work

• Journals have done a reasonably good job over the centuries

• and I would hate to think I’ve been wasting my time over the last 25 years

• Authors still need Journals and Open Access has spawned at least 500 new titles.

• More effort and money is being spent on publications than ever

How to make a small fortune in science publishing • Start with a large one

• What is the financial picture? Who should pay?

• Someone has to pay; journals need to be viable

• Should it be authors or readers?

• I think it is both and should be both; I belong in both camps

• TheScientificWorldJournal first went Open Choice in June 2003• But it was first budgeted in 2000

• Not all authors can pay for Open Access • Even if well-funded or seemingly affluent, and despite the

overwhelming evidence that that Open Access articles are downloaded much more and paying Open Access fees should be a good investment for an Author and his/her Institute

• Open Access fees are apparently insufficient to sustain a publication• See PLoS information and (Springer) BMC history

TheScientificWorldJOURNAL (TSWJ)• TheScientificWorldJOURNAL (TSWJ) was launched in 2001

• Instead of being 100 journals, often competing with each other, it comprises 100 overlapping ‘domains’

• TSWJ is broad from biomedicine to environmental sciences • NB the most important journals have always been broad-based

• Peer-reviewed internet-based journal designed for science & medicine

• Appeals to scientists, who prefer to publish in broad-based non-specialized journals

• Fast – publication times of days

• Open Choice policy – authors do not have to pay

• Also very reasonable (the cheapest?) Open Access fees • Cf. ‘Cases Journal’

Scientific & Medical Publishing ‘101’• Research is Multidisciplinary

– collaborations between scientists of varied backgrounds– choosing journals for particular audiences

• Journals historically divided by all manner of criteria • immunology, environment, neuroscience, reproduction,

development, inflammation, cancer, genetics, cell biology, “American”, “International”, “Society”, “research”, “clinical”

• A paper can be genetics, neuroscience, environmental toxicology, endocrinology, reproduction, cell biology, and development all at the same time

• The existing system of many journals has resulted in a rather ungainly ‘pigeon-holing’ of information.

• TSWJ recognizes the multidisciplinary nature of science, which resists clear-cut definitions

• Rapid, rapid, rapid – speed is not as fast as it seems

TheScientificWorldJOURNAL’s Domains• Organized – like scientific & medical research – into

overlapping sections or “Domains” • Domains are foundation of organization

•each has Editors & Editorial Boards … >700 editors•organized around important areas

•e.g. Neuroscience, Environment, Drug Discovery, Urology, Development & Embryology, Aging, Cancer, Genes & Genomics, Proteins & Proteomics, etc.

• Domains grouped into “Clusters” to help navigation• E.g. TSW Biomedicine, TSW Neuroscience, Neurology &

Psychiatry, TSW Cell Biology & Cancer, TSW Environment • Individual articles appear in multiple Domains according to

relevancy • Result: a broad-based journal with enhanced navigation 

• It is very different from BioMedCentral, for example or Bentham’s plan (for a suite of Open Access journals)

Sustaining journals: Knowledge Exchange • What OA has done is perhaps create the capacity to publish

the results from expanded research activity, but have the budgets for publishing and publications taken this into account?

• Knowledge Exchange (KE)

• Initiative by DEFF (Denmark), DFG (Germany), JISC (UK), SURF (The Netherlands)

• Mission is to create a route to the institutional market for publishers

• It represents nearly 200 core academic institutes and about 1500 ’others’

• JISC, SURF & DFG have pledged to supply TSWJ to all their institutes for 2009-2010/2011

• Of course, if all TSWJ’s articles were Open Access they could ask for their money back

• This may be an important cost effective way to distribute material but it is not global (cf. OA and CISTI)

Knowledge Exchange: Advantages • When the idea of KE was first put forward, many publishers

were ‘wary’ and I was personally advised NOT to submit a proposal, and, of course, I wondered about the purpose and motive of the initiative

• Advice offered:

• KE is just trying to get cheaper prices • Don’t offer too high a discount or you won’t be able to

justify future high prices

• Advantages: it is actually working. I have a signed agreement with JISC; agreements with DRG & SURF are pending

• SURF are even sending TSWJ IP addresses from many institutes

• The discount offered for all institutes was obviously sufficiently attractive for JISC, SURF & DFG, and TSWJ hopes DEFF follows

• KE is scalable, no reason why it couldn’t be extended to other countries/consortia or publishers/publications

Knowledge Exchange & TSWJ• KE’s Selection Criteria

• Innovation and value for money offered by the proposal (40 %)

• Level of compliance with the access strategy (10 %)

• Fit of content to the academic strategy of the country (50 %)

• TSWJ is very pleased to be selected against these critria

• Fundamentally innovative and relatively inexpensive

•Why the big discount?

• Keen to comply with KE access strategy

• As broad based as a country or publication can be •not all molecular biology, neuroscience cognition

•though we have most of our editors in these fields

•urology, neurology, oncology and gastroenterology

•global warming, environmental toxicology & holistic health•social sciences – avoided by most publishers because it is not well funded

TSWJ & Knowledge ExchangeWhy did KE choose TSWJ?

• I hope:

• Because of TSWJ’s potential, which itself is a challenge

•We have no artificial restrictions

•TSWJ wants to grow and KE will help it grow

•But TSW doesn’t have to grow in a commercial sense

• Agreeable to ’demands’ for (web) developments in areas of:

• Persistent identifiers – no problem

• Reference linking – upgrade required

• Shibboleth/SAML – testing required

• (Dark) Archive – British Library

• wc3 standards

• etc

Knowledge Exchange: More Challenges • Open URL

• TSW not yet Open URL compliant (except via CrossRef) but ‘our person will talk to your people’ – we do not envisage problems just solutions

• Downtime & Hack-Attacks

• New agreement with Hotchilli, but, alerting and notification will assuage concerns

• When site down how can news be distributed

• Feed(forward/back)

• PubMed style data distribution – what TSWJ has published for local search engines

• TSWJ News

• TSWJ Statistics – quite a big hurdle, not just counter compliance

We need other criteria

Prostaglandin Receptor Signaling in Disease

Melamine commentary

Global warming

Cardiac development NIDA/SfN cocaine addiction

Åberg article … neuroscience

x• A

f

f

Knowledge Exchange: Scalable? • Which countries and consortia would want to join in?

• The ‘fact’ is we could do with more participation

• France, Italy, Spain & Portugal

• Norway, Sweden & Finland

• Austria, Switzerland

• Ireland – IreL loyal TSWJ supporter

• Near East – Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Russia

• Far East – China, India

• Far South-East – Australia & NZ

• Far-far East – Canada, United States, UC, Harvard, etc.

• Far-far East & South – South America

• South – Africa

• Global Licence is as good as Open Access and maybe cheaper

Questions? • Still to come (if time permits)

• PubMedCentral

• Impact Factors

Note to self: be more controversial • Funds for Open Access are not sufficient to maintain the

current scientific output

• Especially when one considers the developing world and

• Clinical case studies (or case reports)

• The journals being published under the Open Access banner are not particularly innovative. The basic format of the scientific journal from when the ‘Journal des Sçavans’ first hit the streets in 1665, has remained pretty much intact

• The internet makes them possible

• Initiatives such as CrossRef (a ‘link processor’), the enhanced navigation tools between articles, and cross-database searching have the potential for a much greater impact 

• Private sector publishers’ own initiatives – so-called “distributed aggregation” coupled with things like PubMed’s LinkOut application have had a much more significant impact, than say

• … PubMed Central …

PubMed Central• PubMedCentral – is a local aggregation of (some) articles

published elsewhere – it has not been [I suggest] significant

• It has forced significance on the general public by having a mandate that NIH-funded work must be available there and by giving somewhat an unfair competitive advantage to journals that are routinely found there

• Why am I not a fan of PubMed Central?

• Because it is not a fan of TSWJ (=me and others like me)

• It won’t take my ‘genuine article’ pdfs since it demands full text XML coding from publishers for, maybe, all articles

• This is an unnecessary expense and would increase my costs and rates, and undermine my efforts to bring Open Access within the reach of less well-funded authors

• It doesn’t supply me with download data

• It doesn’t pay me

Note to self: be reckless • To what extent is it ‘OK’ for a [US] government funded

entity to undermine the legitimate business of a [Finnish] publisher, through legislation?

• The Intellectual Property (IP) laws were designed to aid the creation of a business of processing and distributing information, i.e. publishing.

• The publishers have always provided the interface between Author and reader; the editors have always curbed the excesses of the authors; the journals – mostly private sector – have done quite a good job

• Is it ‘OK’ for the US Government to turn around and say: “we like what you’ve published so much we demand you to give it to us so we can give it way for nothing and we will not compensate you”?

• Is it sensible for the academic society to celebrate this?

• If the NIH budget is cut, as it has been, how much should research funding be cut to support PMC?

• How far do you trust the US Government?

Note to self: where are we going?• Everything doesn’t have to be Open Access for the system

to work; initiatives like Knowledge Exchange are just as important in the long term

• Scientists need access to the data; when will they switch from celebrating – and being rewarded for - a list of articles, to being a contributor to a dataset that all can use?

• TSWJ will be ready .. We’re set up to publish datasets

• In deference to ‘Impact Factor Junkies’ the good news is that there is no correlation between the impact factor of a journal and the impact factor of an article. Publishing your article on open Access guarantees you as much exposure as merited (e.g. Markovitz 2000 – not peer reviewed).

As merited?• TSWJ’s leading article has been downloaded some 50,000

times

• This sounds good and is good

• It continues to be downloaded several hundred times a month

• Sounds better

• Of course, it has no impact on TSWJ’s Impact Factor (IF); the article doesn’t exist; it would have reduced TSWJ’s IF, had TSWJ been indexed in 2003

• It has been cited twice as far as I can tell …

• Which is more compelling?

• “I published in a journal with an IF of 7.9” or

• “My article has been downloaded 50,000 times so far”

• “Open Access? Of course it is Open Access. How else would you publish?”

• … and what I do for the other 50% of my time …