ICSU-UNESCO Conference on Electronic Publishing in Science, February 2001

The conviction is now widespread that the existing system of scholarly communication through traditional scholarly journals is breaking down. The most visible symptom of the breakdown is the inordinately rapid price inflation of journals and the resulting subscription cancellations by libraries. This paper explores the economic reasons for the breakdown, outlines the suggested remedies and conveys the elements of a proposed replacement system of scholarly communications arising out of a March 2000 meeting in Tempe, Arizona.

Commercial publishers are using the market system to limit access to scholarly literature to those increasing few who can afford to buy it. Because the market is segmented and the highest segments are price inelastic, prices have risen dramatically in recent years, profits have accumulated, and many new journals have started. Yet new journals have not reduced prices for key established ones. Libraries are forced to reduce the number of journals to which they currently subscribe and cannot afford new subscriptions. Because nearly all research published in scholarly journals is publicly funded at some point, limiting access by raising prices is inappropriate. Rather, scholarly communications should be treated like public goods, the widespread use of which benefits society as a whole.

Many scholars now rely on material made available outside of traditional scholarly journals. While this "gray literature "is functional at present, its access is unevenly distributed across the academy and there is no guarantee that it will be archived.

There are many proposals extant to alleviate the scholarly communications crisis. This paper briefly outlines 11 such proposals:

While these proposals/activities show much creativity, they do not represent a comprehensive system. Last Spring, a group of U.S. academic leaders gathered in Tempe, Arizona and developed a set of principles to guide the development of a future scholarly communications system. Those principles deal with the following elements:

Since their early beginnings, electronic information and communication technologies have promised to revolutionize the way scientists communicate and publish their findings. And indeed, these technologies are having tremendous impacts, and are themselves experiencing changes that could hardly be foreseen by the most imaginative Jules Verne of our times. The various actors involved in science publishing are responding with great dynamism to the opportunities and challenges opened up by these advances. Not all promises and expectations, however, are being equally fulfilled. In this paper we critically discuss those that relate to: the paperless and the wireless society, worldwide access to scientific information, organizing the information chaos, dropping journal publication and subscription costs, democratizing the publishing media, and communicating with the broader public.

Six years of experience in HighWire Press, now providing Internet publishing services to over 220 journals brought out by over 60 publishers, provides the basis for some observations on the topic. Timely and equitable access on a global basis to reports of research have altered the role of scientific articles in the practice of science itself. The same sort of access makes the news, commentary, reviews, and editorials newly relevant as well. However, the new features and forms of the Internet editions of these journals which are re-defining, mainly by enhancement, the nature of scientific journals. This brief submission will discuss such features as hyperlinking, inclusion of moving pictures and supplementary data sets, publishing articles when ready, toll free linking, and direct communications between readers and authors. The implications of these features will be presented and the meaning of the implications upon the entire chain of scholarly communication assessed.

If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality-controlled archive and distribution system for research findings, would it be realised as a set of "electronic clones" of print journals? Could we imagine instead some form of incipient knowledge network for our research communications infrastructure? What differences should be expected in its realisation for different scientific research fields? Is there an obvious alternative to the false dichotomy of "classical peer review" vs. no quality control at all? What is the proper role of governments and their funding agencies in this enterprise, and what might be the role of suitably configured professional societies? These and other rhetorical questions will be considered in light of recent experience, followed by some electronic architectural considerations.

but time permitting will go into more detail on the relation to initiatives such as are found at the following URLs: http://ccsd.cnrs.fr/, http://www.openarchives.org/, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

For further background information see Ginsparg96

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Just as the emerging field of genomics is changing the way in which molecular biologists plan, execute and interpret their research, so is the transition from traditional to electronic publishing technologies changing the ways in which the results of this research is disseminated to and used by other scientists. Paper is turning out to be an inadequate medium for the flood of new data that often demands both further manipulation and new methods of visualization as an aid to interpretation. The typical research scientist therefore wishes to have free, or at least unhindered access to as wide a range of electronic information sources as possible, to be able to navigate effortlessly between them and to search, select, integrate and manipulate information without leaving his or her desk.

It is against this background of changing practices and expectations that researchers in the bio-medical sciences have also come to question established editorial, reviewing and publishing practices and even to reconsider the nature of the publication itself. Following calls from the PubMed Central and the Public Library of Science initiatives in the USA, various publishers now offer more or less unrestricted access to their journal archives and they host e-journals with no, or low peer-review barriers to publication. However, these changes address only part of the problem. Much still remains to be done to ensure optimal accessibility of the biological literature and its linkage to databases containing sequences, sequence-related information or digital images. These are the goals of E-BioSci, a European initiative to provide a variety of high quality electronic services relating to full text access and retrieval in the life sciences. E-BioSci will involve a broad spectrum of publishers, service providers, scientific authors, and academic institutes. E-BioSci aims to foster trans-national cooperation in the search for effective solutions to the challenge of achieving effective information access and retrieval in the Life Sciences. The platform will act in a coordinative capacity to remove barriers to free exchange of information and to encourage the pooling of national expertises, the development and evaluation of common protocols for database linkage. It will work to promote the generation of complementarity in the further growth of national information archives.

After three years of continued operation, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Model – http://www.scielo.org - is progressively consolidating as an adequate, advanced and long-term solution to move the Latin American and Caribbean (LA&C) scientific communication to the era of Internet electronic publishing. By the end of 2000, SciELO operates online the full text of 85 journal titles, organized by means of national collections of selected journal titles from Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica and an international collection of the best public health related journals from Ibero-America.

Launched in 1998,, the SciELO Model is being disseminated through out LA&C countries envisaging to radically increase the visibility, accessibility, credibility and impact of their scientific journals, a highly desirable goal due to the fact that they publish contents that are most of the time highly relevant to the solution of local and regional social and economic problems. In this sense, SciELO targets to properly value good quality journals in order to overcome the "lost science" phenomena. In other words, the SciELO Model addresses the classical vicious circle that negatively affects the overall sustainability of developing countries journals. Out of the so called international mainstream scientific communication around the journals indexed by the major United States databases such as MEDLINE and ISI products, the journals titles from developing countries are frequently considered second class publications when not simply ignored by authors, authorities and libraries. In consequence, these journals and theirs authors tend to be less rewarded. Journals, in particular, face enormous challenges to survive and to develop a positive feedback with their authors, user communities and supporters. SciELO ultimate objective is to develop this positive feedback for LA&C scientific journals.

The SciELO Model comprises three major components. First, the SciELO Methodology, which is a set of standards, guidelines and tools for the preparation, storage, publishing, linking, preservation, dissemination and usage and impact evaluation of scientific publications. The methodology is designed to operate under limited infrastructure regarding human resources and information technology, although it is functionally compatible with the major international advancements in electronic publishing. The second model component is the SciELO Site, which operates an integrated collection of scientific journals whose interface allow for searching and browsing individual articles from a given individual titles as well as from the entire collection. The SciELO Sites are set and developed at national level covering the best titles published in a country. They may also cover a specific subject matter at national or international level. Each integrated collection operated by SciELO is expected to offer higher visibility, accessibility, interconnectivity, security, scalability, cost-effectiveness and preservation than the actual operation of ailed individual titles on the Internet. The constant increase on the access to SciELO sites corroborates this expectation. Finally, the third component is the SciELO Network, which is expected to be fully operational in the next two or three years. It will integrate the decentralized SciELO sites through search mechanisms, interoperability and particularly through the production of national and regional bibliometric and informetric indicators that will systematically value SciELO journals by measuring their usage and impact. Currently the SciELO Network is implemented through a simple portal that links to individual decentralized SciELO Sites. The development of the SciELO Sites and its future integration in the SciELO Network will help LA&C best scientific journals to fully integrate the international flow of information.

Developments in Information Technology have had and continue to have a profound effect on the production and distribution of scientific journals. The transition to scientific electronic publishing has actually just begun and, contrary to popular belief, it has not come cheaply, nor will it do so in the future. The high fixed to variable cost ratio characteristic of electronic publishing, combined with the rapidly increasing demands of end users in terms of access, functionality and connectivity, will give rise to large investments on the part of publishers. New business models are needed to take full advantage of new opportunities. Neither publishers nor librarians have found it easy to cope with associated challenges in the current transition period. An announcement will be made as regards dramatically improving access by low income countries.

1)Background and history of scientific publishing in Asia-Pacific regions and Third World countries.
2) Impact of financial difficulties in scientific publishing for Third World countries.
3) Scientific publications for non-English language.
4) Outlook of scientific publishing in these regions in the 21st century.

Before we proceed on to discuss the issue of electronic publishing, we must recognize the unique characteristics of the media/publishing industry in China. China is a Communist country, and as such, the media, electronic publishing included, is administered and staffed by the government, whose purpose and mission is to promote its policies at that time. Therefore, all publishing houses and electronic publishers are numbered and licensed. In view of the current situation, modernization in the sciences and technology is one of China's Four Modernizations Program. As such, scientific R & D as well as scientific education has received top priority among Government policies.

Scientific publishing in most of the third world countries is conducted through the English language owing to cost/readership considerations; indeed, the English language is the langua franca of the scientific community in most areas in Asia such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Owing to China's population size and its insistence to maintain an independent scientific community, China has engaged in the ardent promotion of electronic publishing in the sciences in the last several years.

There are two tiers of electronic publishers broadly defined, namely, products for the public/educational market, and those high end electronic publications for scientific research purposes. The former includes many of the University Presses in China, notably the Peking University Press, Tsinghua University, People's Universities as well as the Beijing Hope Electronic Press, which is in fact an entity of the China Science Publishing Group, which in turn, is the publishing arm for the Academy of Sciences, China's highest body in terms of the R & D of all natural sciences.

Most of the e-publications in the popular category are software and manuals in Chinese notably from Microsoft, Linux, Unix, Lotus, Oracle, etc. These products are introduced into China under licence by computer vendors and commercial publishers (McGraw-Hill, Wiley & Sons, etc.). With the expanding application of the computer in the business and education fields, there is no doubt these publishers are making a profit. However, it could be much better if not for the rampant privacy vis-à-vis these fast moving items.

The largest and perhaps the most complete and serious online publishing project today is the government funded www.cnki.net and www.chinajournal.net.cn. It is a government project administered by the Tsinghua Tongfang Company, Ltd. in Beijing. The CNKI Project Webstation maintains 80 mirror substations all over the country to deliver its some 70 specialized databases and 6,000 (3,000 currently available) serialised journals to its clients. They are also available in CD-ROM format for download at a cost. The web is updated daily.

Given the magnitude of this project, there is no doubt that the government has to fund it at least from the initial stage into the foreseeable future. Probably the China Government regards this as a means of funding for science libraries, which are few in number and poor in quality. To the extent the data is available to the scientific community, the pricing has been very flexible. Again, there is a two tier pricing, for clients in the Chinese Mainland and outside. The latter includes institutions from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as outside China. The writer is still trying to obtain data re: payroll/investments involved, fees and charges and its market prospects to date. Given the importance of China in the world community (and thus, Chinese materials as a source of information), China may be able to get away with selling a portion of its electronic publishing products at a very high price to the outside world.

To what extent this case of China can be generalized and applied to other third world countries in terms of electronic publishing in the sciences remains to be seen.

Since the first ICSU/UNESCO Expert Conference on Electronic Publishing in Science, held in Paris in early 1996, legal protection for coyprightable subject matter has expanded. In particular, the EU-directive on the legal protection of databases now extends exclusive protection to non-original databases. In addition, national courts have begun to interpret these provisions, mostly in a rather narrow way, limiting the possibilities of re-use of published material in the digital and networked environment. On the international level, this new sui-generis protection is highly debated. Especially in the U.S., a large part of the scientific community has spoken up against it, fearing that it would severely affect the production, dissemination and use of scientific information. So far, attempts to enact similar protection both in the U.S. and by way of an international Treaty under the auspices of WIPO have failed.

The presentation will discuss the main features and effects of this legislation.

The internet is a "disruptive" technology: it will change fundamentally how we do things, often in ways that we cannot now envisage. In addition, the internet can magnify the effects of existing trends. Medicine, for example, is likely to change fundamentally not only because the internet means that doctors and patients can instantly access the same information but also because it can hasten the changing relationship between doctor and patient, from that of master and pupil to that of equals.
The internet will opens up new ethical issues within electronic publishing, particularly in relation to privacy. There was not, for example, the same necessity to be anxious about guarding patient confidentiality when a paper journal went to 500 subscribers. Now the whole world can potentially see the information, making it impossible to guarantee anonymity. This "technical" development combines with public anxiety about the failures of doctors and researchers to get fully informed consent. The answer is that patients must give consent for the publication of any material about them and that consent must be fully informed. But must they consent for any data - perhaps their blood pressure - being taken from their records and presented in epidemiological studies along with data from 5000 others? Increasingly patients and politicians are anxious about this, and the internet increases the anxiety because of its enormous capacity for searching and linking. And if hackers can get into the Pentagon and Microsoft it should be easy to access my NHS records, once they are computerised. A "privacy backlash" could damage science and publishing.
We must not just cross our fingers and hope the day never arrives. Rather we need to recognise the expectation, stimulated by the internet, for transparency. Closed processes create suspicions of bias, incompetence, or corruption. Science has too many closed processes. Peer review, for example, can be transformed by the Internet from an arbitrary, usually closed scientific judgment into an scientific discourse that takes place in public.
Finally, the internet may make research misconduct both easier to do and to detect. It can be the work of moments to copy material from distant sites and call it your own, but the same technology may also make it easier for reviewers to detect the plagiarism. Computers allow vast data sets to be "tortured until they confess," but the internet also allows the possibility of all raw data being posted as reports of scientific studies along with the software used to manipulate the data. Again, the internet is enhancing the rise in public, political, and professional anxiety about research misconduct. Scientists and editors need to respond before possibly blunt legislation restricts science and scientific publishing in ways that will help nobody.

The presentation will be based on the outline published in Nature Neuroscience 3(9) September 2000 pp863/4 Further background details will be found in the following publication:

Human Brain Project: A Program for the New Millennium (Stephen H Koslow and Stephen E Hyman)
Einstein Quarterly J.Biol.Med. (2000) 17:7-15.

Scientific information comes in many sizes, types and quality. Because of diversity of the scientific information being published, different issues will arise in publishing different types of information electronically. In this paper, we will address issues related to electronic publication of large scientific data sets, a subset of scientific information. First, we establish the parameters that define large scientific data sets. Then we identify examples from a variety of scientific disciplines. Large data sets (LDS) require special technology for their creation and management, and that technology is briefly described, as well as traditional publication and use of LDS. We discuss electronic publication of large scientific data sets, and their uses as they exist today. Finally, we look into the future of electronic publication of LDS, including issues such as intellectual property rights (IPR), LDS as a source of new discovery and economics.

We are at present witnessing a change from paper to electronic media for the storage, dissemination and handling of scientific articles. In practice, this broadly means a change from one carrier to another. Most electronic publications are simply paper products transposed onto electronic media. Neither the structure, nor the way language is used, is significantly different from earlier practice.

Even worse, while no style difference between a paper article and an electronic article can be detected, a lengthy and tiresome discussion consumes much time in academic circles on how we should appreciate an electronic article vis-à-vis a paper version. "Is it possible to get tenure based on a list of electronic publications?" is the question to be addressed ?

It looks like defending the use of the quill or the fountain pen over the keyboard. One thing must be clear: quality and integrity are non-technical demands that will find precise but different expressions in the usages of different media. For that reason, we have to make clear what we call quality and integrity and then analyse how these scientific and societal demands can be fulfilled in a new medium.

The discussion founders, because it often starts from what we are accustomed to in the paper world and attempts to impose that on an electronic environment. We have to step back and analyse what it means to write for an electronic medium and what it means to read material that is stored electronically. In a paper world, writing and reading are very close. Writing for an electronic medium means an understanding of the full capacities the medium has. Reading electronic articles on the other hand does not mean reading from screen. The presentation becomes flexible! Opposite to paper, the electronic media allow a distinct difference in presentation between the author's favoured presentation and the consumer's reading practice.

An electronic document is not the electronic version of a classical article with embellishments such as hyper-links, colour pictures and animations. An electronic document is a document comprising a variety of different types of information presentation that are brought together by an author in order to present a comprehensive scientific argument.

This means that we have to analyse the demands on quality and integrity on various levels. The first level is the societal notion of a scientific publication, the next level is an analysis of the intrinsic capabilities of the medium -- to what extent it guaranties a fixed-in-time definition, at the same time allowing for change and updates. Bringing this together will help us to craft a new practice in scientific publishing that keeps, or even enhances, the societal demands as well as exploiting the full extent of knowledge presentation in a multimedia environment.

Right from the start, it will be clear that the document form, i.e., a typical paper expression of knowledge presentation, will become only one of many representation forms. Articles in an electronic environment will consist of textual, pictorial and dynamic components, many of which will be shared between different articles. This multiple use of information units will enhance the interaction and discussion between scientists, but demands new standards of intellectual ownership and quality control.

In this presentation, we will start from the notion of an information module as being the smallest unit that can be shared among publications. As these units need proper identification, certification and statement of intellectual ownership, we will discuss the various kinds of metadata needed. Based on that, we will touch on the problem of version management and multiple use of information units.

Aggregators take on several forms in the electronic publishing arena, and having a single collective name for all of these forms has caused some significant confusion to publishers and librarians alike. This paper will show the distinctiveness of each type of aggregator today and why each one brings benefits to publishers of all sizes and to libraries and individuals throughout the world. Aggregators are a life-line for the small publisher in the electronic age.

References are at the heart of scholarly journal publishing. Authors perform due diligence through citations by acknowledging the relevant prior literature. Through references, authors - experts in their fields – direct readers to relevant articles that may on the surface appear unrelated. Linking is at the heart of the World Wide Web articles and therefore reference links are an essential feature of online scholarly journals. Being able to get access to a cited article in one or two clicks, regardless of where that article is published, is very valuable for scientists and researchers. Most of the current scientific literature is now being made available online and publishers are moving beyond just replicating the print page in electronic form to take full advantage of the electronic environment. It is imperative that scholarly publishers link their references and that secondary services and libraries provide links to full text articles. In order to make broad-based linking scalable across a wide range of primary publishers, secondary publishers, abstracting and indexing services and libraries requires an infrastructure for linking. Key components of a linking infrastructure are persistent identifiers for content, standardized metadata and a resolution system to get from the identifiers to the content itself. To implement and keep such a system going requires organization and funding. Scholarly publishers created CrossRef, run by the non-profit Publishers International Linking Association, Inc, to develop and run a system that enables publishers to assign unique identifiers _ Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) - to articles and collect standardized metadata so that the identifiers can be retrieved using bibliographic data. Once the DOI for an article is known, a persistent link to the full text article can be created. Once the basic infrastructure for linking is in place, enhanced linking and discovery services can be created. A DOI can resolve to multiple copies of an article and readers can be presented with a list of options, including local print or electronic holdings. CrossRef uses open standards and is working with libraries and secondary publishers on providing sophisticated services for retrieving scientific articles.

Metadata - structured resource descriptions - has vital role in retrieval of scientific information. Most researchers are used to on-line public access catalogues (OPACs) maintained by libraries. The coverage of these high quality databases is being extended to the electronic materials such as Web sites, e-books and e-journals. In order to cover all Web materials, libraries and other institutions are creating Web indices and archives, which are dependent on metadata embedded in documents themselves.

While OPAC databases use MARC format adopted by large majority of large public and research libraries in the world, embedded metadata relies on new format called Dublin Core.

Long time preservation of electronic documents is an interesting technical, organisational and political issue. One technical problem is related to metadata: what do we need to know about the archived electronic resources in order to be able to keep the documents in theory for ever? If we do not know what has been stored into our archive, we have failed before the job even begins.

Librarians, archivists and other communities have in recent years been investigating the metadata elements needed specifically for archiving. A few of these efforts are described in this presentation. One conclusion that can be drawn is that the final list of preservation metadata elements is not available yet. But it has become clear that the metadata required is dependent on, among other things, the nature of the data stored and the archiving strategy (migration, emulation or something else) the archive maintenance organisation has chosen.

From their creation, learned societies had two important and related missions. First, they provide a community where practitioners of a particular art or science could meet to discuss their work and debate the issues of the day. Second, they communicated the findings of their members to facilitate the advancement of research and discovery in their areas of interest.

Electronic publishing tools, especially the internet, provide Learned Societies with new tools to help them accomplish these missions more effectively and efficiently than ever before. But the new landscape also raise many provocative issues because the new tools challenge the traditions of Learned Societies, reinvent the financial structure of those societies, and allow commercial organizations to compete in their previously exclusive domain. The experiences of several American learned societies will be reviewed to illustrate how they are dealing with the new challenges.

For centuries, the position of the library and the librarian was not under debate. The useful role of the library in society was more or less self-explanatory. And its librarian was an esteemed and valued functionary. In the digital information society however, the library and the librarian obviously no longer enjoy such consensus about their value. Regularly it is doubted they will be needed in the future.

If libraries will survive the new developments in information and communication technology, what will these organizations look like? What future will there be for their librarians? Will the traditional library functions disappear and will they be replaced by new ones? Will librarians disappear altogether or will they - to the contrary - be the pivot of the future information provision?

This paper does not deal with the library Utopia's of the next century, but with the library and the librarian of the next decade. The accent is on libraries within educational and research institutions, especially university libraries.

We shall consider developments the library will be confronted with. We think that the future library will be characterized by four aspects. In the first place it will be a gateway to information, in whatever format this information is written and wherever it is located. Because of the increasing complexity of the information landscape, the second aspect of the library will be that of a centre of expertise. Moreover, there will still be a pressing need for the library as a physical entity, not only as a social meeting place and place of scholarly interaction, but also as a place where students and other users are offered advanced study facilities with adequate user support. Furthermore, the library will not lose its importance as an assembly point of printed literature for the next decades.

The library of the near future can only take on an appropriate shape and will only survive, if librarians can serve in institutions meeting the four criteria just sketched. The librarian has to meet the demands regarding professional knowledge and skills. He must have good didactical, organizational, communicative and contractual qualities at his disposal. Generally speaking, this does not imply very new characteristics compared with the current situation. But by elaborating specific details, it will clarify that quite new job responsibilities and job attitudes are involved. There will only be a future for librarians who are willing and able to take this into account.

The term "the best interests of science" must be interpreted from the viewpoints both of the scientists inside the enterprise and of the supporters and "users" affected by society's using the results of scientific research. This presentation will try to interpret the material presented throughout the Conference in terms of both these viewpoints, but all within the context of this presenter's
perspective, as a scientist, regarding "Why should we have science?"