This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
ANALYSIS AND NEWS


has been careful to ensure that their content not only works on mobile but is also embeddable. Green also stressed the role that end user research plays in OECD’s offerings, particularly a new digital and mobile data portal to be launched in June this year; for publishers to be successful, they need to reach over the heads of intermediaries and have direct relationships with such users.


Monographs OA discussions in the faculty auditorium


NPG in the past 12 months, bringing together two very different businesses in order to be better able to deal with a future that she regarded as being predominantly open access. Although a small segment of the industry might stay closed for reasons of prestige, she predicted that ultimately a tipping point will occur – perhaps a whole-country mandate for OA, or a major health scare – and the vast majority of publishing will be open access in future.


As in the previous session, anxiety was expressed amongst the audience that the move towards authors in effect paying for publication might lead to lower standards. Burridge, who’d earlier noted that more than a third of her correspondents had raised the same concern, insisted that publishers’ reputations depended upon their integrity and guarantees of quality. Neylon addressed the role of peer review in avoiding such conflicts of interest. In theory peer review plays a vital role in publishers’ quality assurance processes, ensuring all parties are held to account. However, there was no evidence, he suggested, that it works, despite all the massive costs in time and effort involved. Regardless of his doubts, however, Neylon feels sure that the future lies not in tearing down the existing system, but rather in experiment with possible improvements.


Combining access with sustainability


Another perspective on OA was offered by Toby Green of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in conversation with Randy Petway of Publishing Technology. Green was admirably frank about the costs of publishing, noting how much it had cost


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo JUNE/JULY 2014 Research Information 5


the organisation to reengineer the organisation’s content when the rise of the iPad had rendered Flash a legacy technology. He wondered who might pay for such work in future, as we move into an OA era. The OECD, he explained, has consequently adopted a freemium access model in which content is free, but services have to be paid for. Thus, he explained, nobody is turned away from knowledge due to an inability to pay, but sufficient revenue is nevertheless generated to fund future development.


Data stands at the heart of the services offered by the OECD, Green explained; making the data behind graphs available added value for readers, while providing authors with granular usage data for their articles ultimately improved the experience for both author and reader. Key factors driving usage of those data were that they were both appealing and accessible; the OECD


Over the course of the Fair, conversation turned repeatedly to the particular problems faced by monograph publishing. In a session on ‘New trends in academic research and what they mean for publishers’, Paul Atkinson, professor of sociology at Cardiff University, made a plea to publishers not to let the form disappear. Sam Burridge of NPG and Palgrave Macmillan had earlier reminded the audience of the importance of finding a viable OA model for books, and of the funding that would be lost, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, if no such model were to be found. Efforts to find a model are clearly underway: panellists mentioned, for instance, the OA monograph options offered by both Brill and Palgrave Macmillan. The situation is however complicated by the fact that print still plays an important role. In an ALPSP session on the future for smaller academic publishers Timothy Wright of Edinburgh University Press noted that print revenues for monographs continue to be higher than digital, and are likely to remain so for some time. However, pockets of innovation can still be found: Burridge described Palgrave Pivot’s experimentation with shorter forms as the most exciting project she’d been involved with, and though Atkinson expressed disappointment at its marketing, he shared her enthusiasm.


LBF


LBF


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33