Conference Report


FEATURE


Rethinking publishing


Siân Harris reports back from the UKSG meeting held in Harrogate in April on some of the expectations of researchers of the role of publishers


‘M


y wish is for an interaction with the “publisher” that doesn’t begin when the science ends,’ said Philip Bourne at the recent UKSG


meeting in Harrogate, UK. ‘Formulating results as research papers loses a lot of valuable information. I want to keep papers but not lose the other things,’ he added. Bourne is a computational biologist at the University of California San Diego. He is also an advocate of open access and is involved in maintaining an important biological data resource, the Protein Data Bank (PDB).


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His vision, which he set out in his conference talk, is to bring publishers into the research process earlier, perhaps at the experimental stage, so that more use can be made of the valuable insight generated during the research process. Currently, information collected during


the experimentation stage of research is spread across a wide range of resources – such as slides, posters, data, lab notebooks, collaborations and journal clubs – and little of this is accessible or useable by others. ‘I confess that I am not good at managing data in my lab. Most intellectual memory


is in email folders and that is not healthy,’ he explained. And a similar picture is true of much of the open software developed by researchers. ‘Software is open, but where is it?’ he pointed out. ‘As scientists we really should be doing a better job.’ Bourne also suggested that better use could


be made of rich media to help to capture these type of resources. ‘Publishers are including video at the moment but I’m not seeing it embedded where I need it,’ he said, suggesting that a video of an experiment is most useful alongside the experimental detail in the text of a paper. ‘The incentive is not there for authors to


do this at the moment. Even if it got more citations, the barrier to do it is too high,’ he said. He believes that integrating rich media is more appealing for researchers to do at an early stage – for example, integrating video with posters – because at that stage


JUN/JUL 2011 Research Information 11


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