Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht and the author of Dutch messengers. A history of science publishing, 1930–1980 (2008), was accompanied by Geert Noorman, the head of NUV (Nederlands Uitgeversverbond – Dutch Publishers Association) and Eelco Ferwerda, publisher digital projects at Amsterdam University Press (AUP).

Questions leading the discussion were: What is a publisher? What is its function in the digital era and how is the Internet affecting the publisher’s value proposition?

Professor Andriesse, the first speaker, stressed that the main incentive for scientists to publish is reputation building and not money-making. Their foremost aim, even though this might seem ideological, is the improvement and enlargement of human knowledge. In this respect publishing is a must: scientists can only deepen their insights through dialogue with fellow scientists scattered over the earth. To ensure the growth of (accurate and valuable) knowledge, scientists let their fellow researchers judge their work on originality and correct reasoning. They then give a (honest) judgment on the value of the research, mostly in a nuanced manner with suggestions for improvements. Of course this system knows its critics, but as Andriesse states, it is the only true way to establish quality: the scientific journal is what it is today because of peer review and the organization thereof. And this is the primary task of the publisher; together with his editorial board and secretariat, the publisher is to ensure the proper functioning and arrangement of the peer review.

Andriesse goes on to consider what the influence of the Internet is on scientific publishing and thus on the peer review process. How does the Internet influence and shape peer review? As Andriesse states, being a publisher is increasingly a question of personality and networking. It is the personal qualities of a publisher that makes his or her name and brand and this will continue to be the case in the digital era. He also states that when it concerns the arrangement of peer review, a lot of discretion is needed. Andriesse ends his talk by discussing two famous Elsevier publisher-scientist combinations: Roosenvelt and Frank (Nuclear Physics) and Akert and Remarque (Brain Research). He concludes by stating that although the shape and the communication of peer review has become digital, this has not accelerated the process significantly. Emerging models like PloS and Biomed are on the rise but they are not really a distraction from all the, as Andriesse states, crap on the Internet. Andriesse clearly states that the Internet can add near to nothing to the scientific journal and its peer review.

Eelco Ferwerda, the second speaker, takes another starting point and discusses two young publishing companies, both Open Access, but each playing a different role. He states that Open Access is a growing phenomenon, where for instance the Dutch funding organization NWO has recently chosen to pursue an open access policy. This rise of Open Access is a direct result of the nature of science and the new possibilities for publishing: computers play a tremendous role in the gathering of information, and re-use should not be prohibited via copyright. Creative Commons and free licenses offer possibilities in this respect, Ferwerda states.

He starts by discussing Hindawi a STM publisher which has since 2007 been completely Open Access. And they make a profit. They make use of a very ‘reductionist’ model: they do not have any direct contact with their editorial boards, everything gets handled by mail. Ferwerda states that the business model of Hindawi is completely focused on growth and profit making and on the development of new journals. By doing market research in Web of Science they search for the best scholars in a certain niche and build up a new journal around them. According to Ferwerda Hindawi thus uses a modern and strictly commercial model with a quantitative and a-personal approach to quality. Open Humanities Press on the other hand follows a different strategy. Founded by academics in 2006, their aim is to remove the cultural barriers that inhibit scientists to make full use of the digital possibilities; their strategy is centered on trust and quality. They seek out the best, well-known scholars to support their product (also e-monographs) and they give a home and a quality stamp to journals set up by academics. By establishing connections with the Library of the University off Michigan and the Public Knowledge Project (with their OJS software) they hope to work more efficiently. They operate on a volunteer basis. As Ferwerda says, they don’t offer money but quality through both their business model and their network. The question is however, as Ferwerda ponders, if this will be a sustainable model in the future. Amsterdam University Press is somewhere in between these models: although they are in many ways a lot like OHP, AUP is a professional publisher that needs to make money. For them Open Access is not so much an enthusiasm as it is a real business model. But as OHP shows, the web has led to a renaissance of scholar-lead publishing which is forcing publishers to rethink their value: they are foremost brand builders, organizers, sellers and distributors in the digital age.

As a final example of new developments in science publishing Ferwerda mentions environments like H-net, a portal for researchers and educators covering all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences. H-net is essentially a discussion network for knowledge exchange. Every sub-field is moderated by a team of scholars and an editorial board. Although not a publisher, H-net is an example of a semi-official form of scientific knowledge exchange. What will this model bring in the future and what will this mean for the publisher? – Ferwerda asks. 

Geert Noorman, the final speaker, brings the focus back to issues of peer review and the Internet. First of all he states that not every article needs an extensive discussion. Peer review also fulfills another function, namely that of ranking research. Being a reviewer is even a form of ranking or reputation building. And doing peer review is important work. And it is still work done by human beings that are fallible, which means mistakes are also still being made. However, as Noorman states, peer review is the only instrument to classify the results of science. It is hard work however, with, as he estimates, between 1-1,5 million articles published yearly. Do we still have enough reviewers (who can and want) to perform this job? Hasn’t peer review become old-fashioned and shouldn’t we replace it by usage statistics? Noorman clearly urges against this notion, citing figures showing that peer review is still very popular. According to these figures only 20% of the people think the current or classical system of peer review is no longer sustainable. 86 % however states they find it very valuable work to do and 91,5 % of the authors says it helped improve their work. When it comes to the digital developments, 73% of the reviewers say digital technologies has made their work easier the last 5 years. What is missing however, says 56 %, is proper information about how to conduct peer review. As to the future of peer review, the research shows processing tools will definitely increase in importance. And this is where, as Noorman states, publishers and universities could play an important role. The Internet could mean a lot to peer review: it builds communities, enlarges communication and it assists peer reviewers in doing their work faster and more efficient and it also enables meta-analysis.

However, as Noorman states, focusing solely on citation scores is a bad thing. Peer review will never become obsolete, although 25% of the researchers mentioned in the previous research think user statisctics might be an alternative to peer review). A thing publishers could focus on is the development of new tools and services that assist with better and faster peer reviewing like CrossCheck, the plagiarism detector by CrossReff.

These kinds of tools will make sure peer review remains alive and kicking in the digital age. Noorman states there should be more attention towards peer review in post-doctoral education, as it is a skill that needs to be trained and it is increasingly part of ones scientific responsibility. Noorman concludes by stating that usage statistics in some cases can be useful but that they miss the discussion element. And scientific discourse will always stay essential..

In the following discussion it becomes even clearer that the participants feel that the review of scientific publications remains essential. However, as Eelco Ferwerda states with pre-print repositories like arXiv, it gets a different function: peer review is more essential for ranking and branding afterwards, and less for direct scholarly communication. Peer review in this sense can be seen as a certificate, it is the end of a discussion, a final qualification: without this qualification you will not be admitted to the scientific annals, it serves as a threshold. With the online comments and the discussion on the preprint version a lot of rubbish also gets sifted out. In the end every article will have to be certified some where, some time. 

After a heated discussion on the need for Open Access (which according to some of the participants is being imposed on scientists by the government, publishers and libraries where others stated that Open Access was initiated by scientists) and the perceived ‘hidden agenda’ of the Dutch governments and its Open Access policy (which according to one participant will be used as an excuse to cut back on scientific funding even further, which was received very skeptical  by the majority of the participants), the concluding remarks focus on the fact that peer review as a process is first of all the property of the scientific community. But to organize it we still need publishers. To make things work better scientists should make clear what their needs are and publishers should keep on showing how they can fulfill these needs and how they can add value to the research process and outcome.

The problem, I felt, of the whole discussion on peer review as reflected on above, is that the speakers most of the time seemed to conflate peer review with (one of) its function(s): the certification of research as being qualitative. What the panelists seemed to essentially agree on was foremost the importance of the certification of scientific research by other scholars (the filter function), for which peer review is just one method. The lack of definitions used to describe peer review during the evening (not one definition was mentioned, if you don’t count ‘classical’) seemed to ignore the fact that not only there are already different levels and manners of doing peer review (from open to semi-open to blind etc.) there are also different methods to perform peer review per field. The difference is also huge between how peer review (often more an editorial process) is conducted in the HSS and in the Sciences. Statements made during the evening like ‘peer review will remain important in the digital age’ thus became quite meaningless with a term and a practice that can have so many meanings and manners. More important to question is what kind of peer review will become more important, and even more, how can we help it, advance it, adjust it or complement it in the digital age with the (alternative) tools and methods at our disposal (which are the more interesting questions concerning peer review I feel).

Next to that we might also start thinking about alternatives to peer review that still fulfill the same basic function as peer review in order to make this process more efficient. In this respect the article ‘On the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing’ by Kathleen Fitzpatrick gives many insights, where she separates the structure of peer review from the purposes it serves (and those purposes we want it to serve and those it actually fulfills).

She distinguishes two functions of peer review: fostering discussion and improving the work, and quality filtering (two functions Ferwerda and Noorman also already touched upon briefly during their presentations). However, the first can also already take place during the research process in an open setting, using user comments on the preprint and focusing more on the communication between scholars. Fitzpatrick goes on to establish the benefits these kind of open peer review systems offer to scholarly communication: 

“Vast amounts of scholars’ time is poured into the peer review process each year; wouldn’t it be better to put that time into open discussions that not only improve the individual texts under review but are also, potentially, productive of new work? Isn’t it possible that scholars would all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place? Would the various credentialing bodies that currently rely on peer review’s gatekeeping function be satisfied if we were to say to them, “no, anonymous reviewers did not determine whether my article was worthy of publication, but if you look at the comments that my article has received, you can see that ten of the top experts in my field had really positive, constructive things to say about it”?”

It is this discussion on how to really improve scholarly communication foremost (which in my opinion comes before quality – not saying that quality establishment is not also of the utmost importance) with the digital possibilities which I felt was missing[*] in especially Andriesse’s and also Noorman’s discussion of this system and which made the evening into a not very exiting all-agreeing praising of systems we now actually have the chance to improve – apparently not during these kind of panel discussions however. 

By the way, Kathleen Fitzpatrick is currently offering her book manuscript, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy for public review via MediaCommons Press.

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[*] Next to a further discussion on the rise of scholarly- and library-led publishing initiatives, which can certainly be seen as threatening the traditional roles of the publisher when it comes to both arranging peer review and to arranging the production and distribution of scientific content.

Touched by History

The first publication of the OAPEN project has recently come to light, a collection of essays by Johan Huizinga entitled De hand van Huizinga, collected and with an introduction by Willem Otterspeer; the essays are in Dutch, via Amsterdam University Press, but will also be translated into several other languages via the other OAPEN partners, in French by Presses Universitaires de Lyon and in English by Manchester University Press.

Who would have known that the works of such a, as some characterize him, posh and studious historian, would be at the forefront of these kind of digital experiments? For as I wrote before, one of Huizinga’s other great works, Homo Ludens, was part of an AUP/Athenaeum Bookstore POD series which is doing very well in the Netherlands at the moment (strange thing being that I have been seeing these editions pop up everywhere now – makes you wonder whether a secret small print run hasn’t replaced the ‘handicraft’ disguise of the ‘genuine POD edition’). Next to that Huizinga’s works can also be found on the Project Gutenberg Website, amongst others The Waning of the Middle ages (in Dutch), his most famous work, and Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

Of course Huizinga’s international renownedness, the accessibility of his work, covering a wide range of topics, and the beautiful and playful character of his language will be appealing to both an academic public as well as a more broader public interested in general cultural topics and literature. These considerations must have been influential when it comes to the choice of such an author and scholar for these kinds of new projects; not only to give the projects themselves a little more flair and esteem, but foremost to revive interest in one of Holland’s most gifted scholarly writers.

On a more personal level I am also very proud and glad this selection of essays has been picked to be the first OAPEN publication, as I am originally a (cultural) historian by education and Huizinga has always been my favorite historical thinker – well to be honest it is a tie between him and Walter Benjamin, although the latter can’t technically be called a historian as he is such an inherent cross- and interdisciplinary thinker.

But Huizinga can’t be called an ‘ordinary’ historian either! His orations, books and essays cover a huge array of subjects and his style is –although of course a little outdated- very lively, fresh and passionate. I absolutely love the little review Carel Peeters wrote about the essay collection for the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland. Here is an excerpt (my translation):

“Although he [Huizinga] developed from an esthete who believed art to be far superior to the natural sciences, into a moralistic cultural critic, Otterspeer sees the ‘larger unity’ of his work in the logical ‘metamorphoses’ he went through. Out of the philologist developed the historian, out of the historian came the cultural critic and from there developed the cultural-anthropologist. The connection between everything being the Burckhardtian idea that history is ‘poetry in its highest sense’. For Huizinga it eventually all comes down to literature.”

This excerpt is a direct reference to Otterspeer’s introduction to the essay collection, where Otterspeer furthermore states that ‘according to Huizinga language originated like poetry originated: from a lyrical merging of sensory impressions. Synesthesia was the cradle of language’ (my translation). Otterspeer’s introduction tries to give an insight in the development of both Huizinga’s character and his work and is a must-read if you are interested in Huizinga’s works and thoughts. You can read or download De hand van Huizinga here in Dutch or wait a little longer for the French and English translations.

Highlights from APM – Day 2

The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.

 

The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.

Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.

In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.

 

Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:

 

1. Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
2. Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
3. International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.

 

Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of  at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.

These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.

Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.

 

The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.

 

Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.

 

Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.

De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:

 

 

 

-         University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.

-         University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.

-         University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.

-         University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

 

University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.

 

In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.

When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.

SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi  publishing agency.

Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.

 

 

Highlights of APE 2009 – Day 2

On the second and final day of APE, Sebastian Mislej of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, talked about videolectures.net, a website streaming online video lectures that can be viewed for free. All the content on videolectures.net is scientifically approved (it has been peer reviewed) so in its entirety it forms a complete scientific repository of free top conferences’ content. The site is hosted and supported by well known academic institutions, where some of the content partners and contributors are for instance MIT Open Course Ware, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Cambridge. The site makes use of semantic web applications and additional functionalities like streaming video with synchronized slides. They also add links to other resources. As Mislej states, the website functions as a learning culture, the links that are necessary to understand the topic will and can be added. In this way videolectures.net can be seen as a kind of scientific YouTube, a portal to high quality scientific video content on the web.

As Mislej explains, 99% off all people giving the lecture are very interested in putting their video online; they really want to put their videos online. Publishers of conference proceedings are also positive, since it is good promotion for their content. In the future videolectures.net will improve the web portal (redesign, improve navigation, automatic knowledge object linking), it will be extracting semantic information (speech indexing, text mining, video mining, automatic ontology construction, user tracking and profiling) and it will focus on solving some important issues regarding intellectual property on content, and problems regarding video formats, mobile platforms and accessibility.

 

Hans Pfeiffenberger, from the Helmholtz Association, gave a lecture on publishing data, focusing specifically on “Earth System Science Data”, a data publishing journal. As Pfeiffenberger stated, in polar research the incentive is to preserve the data and their meaning for centuries in the future. This data preservation is best done by publishing them. The question is how publishing can help comply with the requirement of quality assurance for research data. As Pfeiffenberger remarks there are of course different kinds of data and this means we will also need different methods to take care of them. According to him review guidelines for data should focus on originality, significance and data quality. The peer reviewers will have to look into the data itself and look at its quality and the connection to the article. Articles can then be seen as interpretations of the data.

Pfeiffenberger states that it is also important to have incentives for researchers to publish data. We need to have rewards for data publication, it needs to be citable and it needs to be part of the impact factor. And, as stated before, it needs to be quality assured data. Preservation and (open) access to data are also critical issues. The aim should be to reuse and reproduce the data. The data will be provided by the scientists but who will provide the infrastructure? And what about licensing and long-term preservation? Pfeiffenberger concludes that these are issues that we will need to consider in the future.

 

 

During the afternoon panel on Open Books, three panellists from the publishing world, Eelco Ferwerda from Amsterdam University Press, Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic and Barbara Kalumenos from STM publishers, where asked to discuss two questions.

The first question focused on the Academic book in the digital age: What it is now and in 5 years – what will users expect?

Eelco Ferwerda first said a few introductory words about the OAPEN project and afterwards replied to the first question by stating that users will in the future expect to find, access and search within books online. He stated that it was Google that changed the whole idea of books for us. Because of Google, books have now become an integral part of the Internet and in this way have gained a new future. Now where is the book heading? Ferwerda recalls Robert Darnton’s pyramid model, in which the book is seen as a pyramid consisting of different layers: the book itself and comments, updates, e-learning, primary sources and datasets in other connected layers. Ferwerda gave the example of the Driver II project, focusing on enhanced publications, where research data, extra materials and post-publication data will be added to the primary publication. The moment scholars recognize the value of these types of additions, they will become the norm.

 

Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic went on to compare the old publishing model with a new future model, The old model is based on printed content, on publishers as gatekeepers who verify and brand the work, and on publishers as bankers. In this model costs can be a barrier to dissemination together with a limited range of formats. In the new model however, she states that there can be multiple versions and formats of content, on different locations and channels. In this new model here will be competition with free versions and it will be uncertain who will pay for the publishing process.

One existing online business model revolves around publishers charging for the premium content and putting free content around the premium content in order to generate the traffic. Pinter asks what would happen if you inverted that model? What if you would offer the free premium content online (with a CC license) and then would charge for the activities around it, like the print edition and a variety of other services and activities.

According to Pinter, this is what academic authors will want because they do not need publishers anymore. Publishers need to find some new models that sustain the user needs whilst still upholding the quality added value system and rewarding structure.

 

Barbara Kalumenos from STM Publishers, states that STM has focused mostly on journals. The problem, as she sees it, with future forecasts when it comes to digital books has to do with the fact that there is still way too little hard factual material available on digitized books. She also states that the term books is way to general, we need to differentiate between textbooks, monographs etc. and then focus on these categories specific. What Kalumenos especially regrets is the lack of numbers on the amount of books that are already digitized. As she states, we need to do some basic empirical research on what the status quo is at the moment. Only then can we speculate what will happen in five years. And it also depends heavily on the discipline. The users however are in the centre of this development. What does the user want? The user wants its content easy, directly and with very few clicks, as Kalemunos remarks, you loose users after more than three clicks as user interaction research has shown. This kind of research can also show how the users search and interact with the material. Kalemunos doubts that monographs in HSS will only be used in digital environments, which means that web 2.0 tools will be developed for books too, but maybe not for the full catalogue of books. So she concludes that we should look at user behavior and what they expect of electronic books in the digital age.

 

During the discussion that followed after the first question remarks where made about the book format, the development to more article use and production in HSS and the possibility of the emergence of a middle category in between the article and the book.

Next to that the funding possibilities of monographs were discussed. As Eelco Ferwerda remarked, the book is different in this respect: the economic model of distributing books is becoming impossible. Academic publishers suffer selling proper monographs. An Open Access motive for books might be to come up with a new business model to keep the book alive as a research format. Frances Pinter made the point that with books, whether they are expensive or not, we need to look at, what are the actual costs of reading a book in print and online.

 The second question focused on Open Access publishing models for books:  How will they work, change scholarly communication and change the market?

Eelco Ferwerda starts by talking about the IMISCOE series. The basic Open Access model for this kind of series, he remarks, is a hybrid model, where on both focuses on online and print. The basic online edition is free and the printed edition is sold, where the author retains the copyright. OAPEN wants to expand this model; they want to develop a common approach or model to fund the Open Access edition, in collaboration with research councils. In their view a network is needed and funders need to see this as a service. Funding model will revolve around a fee for direct costs and revenues from additional services.

 

As Frances Pinter remarks, the situation for Bloomsbury Academic is rather different. Bloomsbury Academic is a commercial company so needs to cover its costs completely. Printing editions appear simultaneously with the online edition. They are offering traditional publishers service along with free online access and added value services.

As Pinter mentions, this is also a start up: additional added value services to sell around the content still need to be developed on top of that. What about licensing contracts? Authors do no longer need the publishers, so we will no longer have exclusive licenses between author and readers in both ways. The big question is whether people will really pay for the added services. According to Pinter that is a risk for the publisher to take. But who is going to fund the added value services that the publisher provides? Pinter asks what would happen if we would not see publishers as people who take the risk? What if they become more like the service arm for scholarly work? Pinter imagines an independent party that tenders between different publishers for a service contract to put in that added functionality. It would be a more streamlined system in this way according to her.

Barbara Kalumenos however remarks that putting a layer between publishers as Pinter says, might not work well in a system made up of all kinds of different country policies and it will probably only lead to extra bureaucracy. Kalumenos thinks more in the lines of Open Access as part of the research costs. Open Access should be paid as part of this process. Afterwards remarks were made concerning the degrading of the publisher in these kinds of new models from the value adding / risk taker to a service offering party. Important in this respect is the second process of reviewing for the commercial sustainability of a monograph. This also has an added value for it helps to bring out the better publications. What will happen with this when publishers will be service providers: what about the needed commercial filter to see if this book is fit to be published? Finally Eelco Ferwerda remarks that publishers will always be in competition for content, based on their reputation.