Bianca Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors Notes

Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors Official Notes

1) What works in process of implementing an Open Access project?
2) What has not worked/why
3) Where would each like to go or plan to go to take project to next steps

Goal: to start all of us thinking to create synergy for all of us to accomplish together what we could not do on our own

BioOne

BioOne: is a medium by which you can get to the articles themselves; interested in collaboration in any way that makes sense and has worked that we

1) What works in process of implementing an OA project?
12 OA journals which have evolved organically all the time
Comes into play when the publication product is complete, i.e. peer review and editing all ready completed
Job to add DOIs, indexing, HTML, archiving, migration, compliance, and memberships in various programs (e.g. CrossRef)
Ensure perpetual access
OA vs. subscribed collection
OA does not earn $, subscription fees largely paid back to publishers
OA titles successful, bring traffic,
problem: not scalable, BioOne can't keep paying to support OA titles (20 titles have gone to commercial publishers)
problem: no hard criteria for joining, but you must have quality; libraries will not invest in products that do not have minimum criteria such as citation usage, peer review, solid editorial boards, etc

what is a public good?
non-
non-excludable

free ridership: offer exclusive benefit; compelling payment; an assurance contract (like groupon)

PLoS

PLoS - Catriona MacCallum PLosBiology in addition to PLos1
sustained now completely on foundation money
Beginning of PLos BIology in Oct 2003 - high quality,
Community Journals began 2005 to demonstrate successful publication by smaller societies
Changing the way the journal operates: editors do not ask how important the paper is or who the audience is?
no size limits
what are the functions of the journal that are required in an online environment?
publishing 70publications /day; 4000 per quarter; submissions 80000 papers /quarter
PLoS helps get the right audience to the right papers
post publication information
free access is not the same as open access; open access supports re-use
how do you organize the content of a massive journal like PLoS1? Different types of collections catering to different fields; Biodiversity Hubs - getting the community to look at articles after publication and aggregate content in one source; have some curators that would search the content and build up hubs that could then be used by the community
rather than inventing its own "mothership" it's repurposing existing content from various databases
a work in progress

getting away from the journal as a venue of publication
Impact Factors are not always helpful; look at the individual value of an article >> PLoS metrics
OASPA - OA Scholarly publishers association
you can't measure impact simply by downloads and citations - what is the impact on research and the real world?
goal to put more value on the post publication side - but can only do this with OA content
expanding engagement of the community: editors > authors > reviewers > users

Abel Packer - SciELO
[see slides]

Funded by state of Sao Paolo
20 years old, sustainable opportunity
4 functions: indexing (social sciences, health sciences, engineering, linguistics, arts, biological sciences)
30,000 articles/year
major collections: Brazil, Chile, total 16 countries participate, 1800 journals total, Brazil collection has 1.2 mil downloads/day
Open access and moving towards publication as soon as article is ready

work in national collections
work in networking

problems: political support - impact factors
visibility of LA authors higher if they publish in int'l journals
language issue
publishing in Portugese & English

goals: internationalization
large amount of peer review coming from Brazil for now b/c of language issue

Pensoft

Lyubo Penev
[see slides]

Pensoft has 11 journals total
some est. by Pensoft some by socities
content goes to various aggregators but 6 major ones are: EOL ispecies, BHL, Plazi, GBIF, Mendeley
semantic enhancements: mapping vocabularies; visualize by clicking on figures, crosslinks w/in content - getting profiles on taxa from various sources w/in Pensoft profiles; connects directly to BHL to the historical literature
lessons learned: innovative publishing not possible under subscription based model!
archiving is really important - a core function of libraries - BHL should be THE biodiversity archive

Mendeley

Jan Reichelt- Mendeley

Story of how he wanted an easier way to do research >> 3 years later Mendeley!
the research process: hundreds of PDFs all over your hard-disk
Mendeley is like iTunes for PDFs
looking for the biggest letters on the first page, likely the title
extracting data from PDFs to index content
in-Mendeley PDF viewer
aggregation of research data into the cloud >> transparency and community
Mendeley is a collaboration platform aggregating user lists of articles, tags, discipline, geography
generates PDF previews - significantly increase click-throughs to publishers and engagement rates
recent uptake in use of Mendeley purely user driven
Mendeley advisor program now has 650 advisors around the world that shares the work for them - outsourcing your PR and training-the-trainer program!
Mendeley integrates a workflow tool w/ content >> transparency >> drives usage and value add

challenges: remaining focused w/ limited resources
people don't make it easy for academics to do their work
impact factors are barriers to innovation
supporting alternative metrics movement
APIs from Mendeley crowd-source innovation of data use w/in the community, e.g. Mendeley binary battle
re-purposing and re-monetization
important part of this is about building the community
Mendeley groups is a way to monetize content in new ways
leveraging communities and monetize in new ways

Q&A

sustainability requires investment
keeping up w/ technological needs
educating & communicating w/ researchers is critical
long term archiving & migration
leverage collaborations, don't re-create the wheel

PDF as a format isn't going anywhere for some time
PDF will die out as newer most robust formats allow you to interact with content

BHL as repository manager, PDF as repository output, not necessarily PDF content

Mendeley to release prototype of IR project w/ U of Cambridge in the coming weeks
Mendeley was not intended to be discipline specific - there is a large bio science community & medicine -- collaboration w/ Zotero