Science Publishing Alternatives: A Forum

Electronic publishing and the Internet are changing the face of scientific communication, raising questions about the publication of scientific research results. Access to the scientific record is also an issue of considerable discussion in the scientific community and the libraries that serve it. Some of the questions being asked are:

• Are established journals essential to the quality of the scholarly research record?
• Should the scientific record be freely available to all?
• Is cost a barrier to online access to the scientific research results?

To explore these and related questions, Johns Hopkins University Libraries sponsored a Forum on Publishing Alternatives in Science on October 1, 2001 from 2pm to 4pm in the West Lecture Hall of the Wood Basic Science Building. The following individuals participated:

(Download the free Quicktime Player to hear the audio files below)
James Neal (Audio File) Vice President of Information Services & University Librarian Columbia University Moderator
Professor David E. Schulenburger(Audio File) Provost University of Kansas Keynote Speaker The Crisis of Scholarly Publishing
PANEL:
Barbara Starfield (Audio File) Professor, University Distinguished Service Professor, Health Policy & Management, Professor, Population & Family Health Sciences, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Professor, Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
Jonathan Bagger (Audio File) Professor, Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, Kennedy Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Stephen Desiderio (Audio File) Professor, Molecular Biology & Genetics, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University and Associate Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Audio file of Q & A Session
Audio file of Summary
Audio file of Full Lecture
Press Coverage of Forum

Information about and discussion of these issues can be found on the sites listed below.

Advocacy & Issue Focused Organizations & Initiatives

• SPARC
  Alliance of research institutions, libraries, and organizations the encourages competition in scholarly communications market.  SPARC introduces new solutions to scientific journal publishing.
  
• Public Library of Science
  
• Nature Webdebate
  Future e-access to the primary literature
  
• NPR's "Science Friday", June 22, 2001 (To hear it, download RealPlayer for free.)
  Ira Flatow's guests were Harold Varmus, President of Memorial-Sloan Kettering in NY; Ann Okerson (liblicense-l moderator), Associate University Librarian at Yale, and Karen Hunter, Senior VP of Elsevier.
  
• In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing, Jean-Claude Guédon, Université de Montréal
  This article gives a good historical perspective in light of present concerns and issues.
  
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Charles W. Bailey, Assistant Dean for Systems, University of Houston
  This bibliography presents selected English-language sources useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the internet. The focus is 1990 to the present, but a few sources prior to 1990 are included.

Publishers / Publishing / Archiving

• Evolutionary Ecology Research
  Started as a less expensive alternative to Evolutionary Ecology published by Kluwer with the aid of SPARC.
  
• BioOne
  A collaboration of scientific societies and libraries.
  
• HighWire Press
  A collaboration of scientific societies and libraries.
  
• Project Euclid
  A collaboration of Cornell Libraries and Duke University Press.
  
• BioMedCentral
  
• PubMedCentral
  
• E-Biosci
  The European equivalent to PubMedCentral under the sponsorship of the European Molecular Biology Organization [EMBO].
  
• Los Alamos E-Print Repository
  
• NetPrint
  A pre-print collaboration of BMJ Publishing Group and Stanford University Libraries’ Highwire Press
  
• OpenArchives
  The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication.