Networked Information Resources Serial crisis, electronic publishing

Serials pricing crisis

Source, (Savenije, 2004) The SPARC initiative: a catalyst for change, available at http://www.library.uu.nl/staff/savenije/publicaties/ticer2004.htm

An inelastic market Inelasticity market caused by the monopoly of “core journals” by commercial publishers

Rising cost The proliferation of journals results in small circulation per title, which results in upward pressure on unit prices (to spread the first-copy cost)

Growth of serial titles Increase in scholarly output (pressured by the academic rewarding system) Fragmentation of knowledge (growth of specialties)

Growth of Serial titles Source: Association of Research Libraries

Pricing digital publication The relatively high fist-copy cost and relatively low marginal or incremental costs of culture products. Differential pricing by versioning (e.g. hardcover and paperback) to extract the most economic value

Added value Hypertext links to cited articles in the collection More powerful search engines with additional features Current awareness notification via email based on bibliographic categories or keywords Opportunity to view online articles prior to release of the site license versions Higher resolution images than are available (Varian, 1996)

Open Access Movement Electronic publish reform movement Open access journals: Public Library of Science , PubMed Central, Highwire Press at Stanford Library Open Archive Initiatives (OAI) Response from library community: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

Typology of e-journals P-E journals: primarily paper based, available through electronic channels. E-P journals: primarily distributed electronically, but may have limited distribution in paper form. Pure e-journals *peer-reviewed vs. self-publishing

The electronic publishing reform movement Paul Ginsparg (developer of Los Alamos physics e-print server) Stevan Harnad (Editor of Psycoloquy) Andrew Odlyzko (bell lab, u. of Minnesota)

Interactive publication Criticisms of peer-view process Electronic journal of open peer commentary e.g. Behavioral and Brains Sciences (BBS) preprint archive subscriber's version Psycoloquy (refereed Journal with Peer Commentary since 1990)

“scholarly skywriting” For most investigators the formal submission of a manuscript for peer review is not the first stage at which it has been subjected to peer scrutiny. That is what all those prior discussions and symposia and preprints had been intended to elicit. And all this prepublication interaction is clearly continuous with the lapidary stage at which the manuscript -- usually further revised in response to peer review -- is accepted and archived in print. Nor does it really end there, for of course the literature may respond to a contribution directly or indirectly for years to come, and there are even ways of soliciting postpublication feedback in the form of "open peer commentary“ (Harnad, 1991).

Inescapable imperative? “Regardless of how different research areas move into the future, I strongly suspect that on the one- to two decade time scale, serious research biologists will also have moved to some form of global unified archive system, without the current partitioning and access restrictions familiar from the paper medium, for the simple reason that it is the best way to communicate knowledge, and hence to create new knowledge” (Ginsparg, 1999)

Reclaim the publishing function “The new technologies, however, are making possible easy publication journals by scholars along. It is just as easy for editors to place manuscripts of referred papers in a publicly accessible directory or preprint server as it is for them to do the same with their own preprints. (Odlyzko, 1996)”