What I want to talk about Knowing me, knowing you Why do you want to publish? What do journals want to publish? What is the publication process? How is publishing changing?

The verdict Everything has changed or Nothing of consequence has changed

Publication = making public only difference is being posted online and not rolling off the printing press Who still prints out that really important article to read? People are mainly using journal sites as electronic archives (searching definitely better)

US librarian panel, May 2006 “When we have online resources, no one accesses print.” “If it’s online we want it; if it’s print we don’t” “Paper is a terrible way of distributing information. Journal content belongs online.” And it’s got “worse” since then Some young researchers aren’t even aware that the journal they’re accessing exists in paper

Differences DISTRIBUTION Speed Geographical “ reach ”

BMJ (1840) 100,000 print copies go to BMA members, 10,000 go to librarians bmj.com (1995) Now has three times the circulation of print BMJ Number of Online v Paper readers Online now = 3 x Paper

Differences DISCOVERY Everything is much more available whether you know what you ’ re looking for or not The Google effect Back issue digitisation (Find BMJ on

Differences THE ARTICLE References hypertext linking Forward referencing Data Multimedia

1997 predictions: the view from 2002

Differences ACCESS Paper,print, binding, postage = € € € € Marginal cost of moving digital information around = nearly zero Still, most traditional journals maintain access controls (more on this later)

Exploiting the new media: to reduce print frustrations Frustrations due to timing Frustrations due to space Frustrations due to the medium of paper

The common trajectory paper electronic Time

Articles ahead of print Articles instead of print Canonical versions New sorts of content: blogs, podcasts, polls, multimedia paper electronic Time

Advantages: online v print OnlinePrint Length? Full text (or more) Summary (or less) Timeliness? ImmediateAfter a variable delay Breadth? MultipleSingle Interactivity? Immediate: srapid response Delayed Letters to the editor

Q: Which is the real journal? paper electronic A: The e journal is the journal

Where is this heading? paper electronic PoP, or Publish oblivious to Print

Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff Breakdown the barriers between the journal and the world

The way we were

The distance between us Yes No unsolicitedsolicited

Global voices on the AIDS catastrophe War Evaluating the quality of health information on the internet The limits of medicine and the medicalisation of human experience Road traffic crashes Neurodegenerative diseases Doctors' well being What is a good doctor and how can we make one Managing chronic diseases Doctor-patient communication and relationships What doesn't work and how to show it Theme issues chosen by readers

Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff Open access

Open access: the context

Open access: the philosophy “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw (irish playwright)

Open access: the vision It's easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable, from any researcher's desk, worldwide for free. - Steven Harnad

Open access: the definition Electronic versions of the full text of peer reviewed, original research articles made freely available to all, immediately on publication.

Open access: the implementation The (much reduced) costs of online publishing were met by the authors (funders) rather than readers (librarians)

new Free access to all old manuscript + copyright author € manuscript + €

The funders’ revolt As a funder of research, we are committed to ensuring that the results of the science we fund are disseminated widely and are freely available to all. Unfortunately, the distribution strategies currently used by many publishers prevent this. The fundamental point is that as a research funder we have to question whether it is right that we, and others, are in the position of having to pay to read the results of the research that we fund. Wellcome Trust

Revolting funders NIH Wellcome Trust UK research councils NHS (maybe soon) EU (And revolting authors too, who are self archiving on institutional repositories and elsewhere)

Web 2.0 Interactivity Community User generated content Social networking…. ……how could that translate into scientific journal practice?

Where might journals go? Paper is brief and beautiful and I love it, but it ’ s a wholly inadequate medium to conduct the conversations that humanity has to have. What were journals created for in the first place? To enable knowledge creation by conversation, except that every exchange took six months. What we need is much more proficient knowledge creation. - Bela Hartnavy, 1996

“Whenever I am lonely at night, I look at a large map depicting internet routers spread throughout the world. I imagine sending out a spark, an idea, and a colleague from another country echoing that idea to his colleagues, over and over again, until the electronic chatter resembles the chanting of monks.” - CA Pickover Conversation

Where might journals go? “ The power of bringing together the right minds around a subject in an on-line dialogue, well facilitated, well deliberated, I think has enormous potential to help us get through issues that we ’ ve never solved before. You see this embodied in the open source model for software creation. But that same model could apply to policy issues, social issues, educational issues. ” - Mario Morino

Where might journals go? “The development of web and internet technologies may well signal the next big leap in the evolution of thought and reason. For we now have a medium in which ideas can travel, mutate, recombine and propagate with unprecedented ease and (increasingly) across the old barriers of culture, language, geography and central authority.” - Andy Clark

Where might this lead for the scientific article?

So has the new technology Changed everything or Changed nothing of any importance ?? * And - what are your predictions for the next five years?