Report: Open Access Policy may be Unsustainable for Publishers

An eye-opening report by consulting firm FTI, forecasts a massive financial cost to UK university presses and journal publishers if proposed UK Research Institute (UKRI) guidelines on open access are fully implemented. The report also suggests that UK based research contributes more than 60% to the economy than it costs to produce and this impact would be under threat as publisher business model erode. The report estimates that in the period 2022 – 2027 the loss to UK based journal publishers would be £2.0B and that monograph publishing (already on a shoestring) would be unsustainable for many current publishers.

The UKRI policy has not been finalized but it broadly understood to follow the Plan S open access directives: UKRI funded articles should open access immediately on publication, with no an embargo, free to access and under a copyright license which maximizes access.  

UK research itself may be comprised as output would migrate to other markets and other countries where legacy business models would be sustainable, and while other countries and markets might also be on an open access trajectory, the fact the UK would move earlier and faster might perpetuate some of these older models. The report refers to this as a ‘first mover disadvantage’.

The report won’t speculate on what options may be considered by publishers when this UKRI policy is adopted; but, this policy may have devastating effects on publishers, particularly smaller, association or membership-based publishing in niche markets. It is also unclear how much researchers, academics and libraries may benefit since in the totality of academic research this policy might immediately impact only a small amount of published content. Libraries will still continue to license large fee-based content to support their constituencies. What the report points out is the potentially disproportionate negative impact on UK based publishers and that some would ‘go out of business’.

Read the full report here

Initiative for Open Citation Data

A new group backed by PLOS, Wikimedia Foundation, eLife and others has come together to establish a framework for sharing article & journal citation data in an open manner.   In a short period of time this initiative appears to have gained significant support from publishers such as American Geophysical Union, Association for Computing Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.  Each of these publishers have agreed to supply citation metadata publically and this support will also significantly increase the amount of citation reference data available in Crossref.

The organization establishing this effort is named I4OC and they list (on their site) what key benefits should result for release of the citation databases: 

• The establishment of a global public web of linked scholarly citation data to enhance the discoverability of published content, both subscription access and open access. This will particularly benefit individuals who are not members of academic institutions with subscriptions to commercial citation databases.
• The ability to build new services over the open citation data, for the benefit of publishers, researchers, funding agencies, academic institutions and the general public, as well as enhancing existing services.
• The creation of a public citation graph to explore connections between knowledge fields, and to follow the evolution of ideas and scholarly disciplines.

Press release here

UK Public Libraries to get Free Access to Academic Journal Content

Announced today (press release) by the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS-UK) is a pilot program that will make thousands of academic and scholarly content available to public library patrons.   The publishers making their content available for free include: ALPSP, Bloomsbury Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Dove Press, Elsevier, Emerald, IoP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, SAGE Publications, Science Reviews 2000 Ltd., Springer, Taylor & Francis, Versita, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer Health.

This pilot program which is expect to run for two years follows a technical trial period which was completed earlier this year.  The initiative itself is the result of consultation between libraries, publishers and agencies that was instigated by the Finch report of 2012.  In that report, the parties were encouraged to provide access to peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, free of charge, for ‘walk-in’ users at library premises.  The purpose of this access would be to (according to the report findings) enhance the ‘walk-in’ access already available at university libraries, and would enable anyone to have free access to a wealth of journal articles and conference proceedings at their local public library.

With UK public libraries under increased funding pressure over the past five years, it is assumed that providing patrons with this breadth of content and access will encourage more patrons to visit public libraries.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 3): Canadian Copyright, Peer Review Challenge, Open Access Directive, Visual Storytelling + More

In an inevitable but still significant decision, The University of Toronto has declined to renew a controversial licensing deal with Access Copyright (Varsity):

“This is a significant victory that will save students over $1.5 million annually and is the result of a campaign led by students and faculty,” said Agnes So, vice-president, university affairs of the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU). “I am glad that the University of Toronto has listened to our concerns and ended the collection of a fee that many students saw as a cash grab.”
In a press release, the university stated that it was unable to reach an agreement with Access Copyright at a price that was fair for the services the company provided. It cited changes in copyright regulation — including the alterations to the Copyright Act made in 2012, the Supreme Court’s expansive approach to fair dealing, changing technology, and increased availability of open access material — as reasons for why the price of the license was no longer fair. Other universities have decided to end their license with Access Copyright, including the University of British Columbia (UBC), Queen’s University, and York University. Access Copyright sued York in April 2013; the case is being closely watched across the education sector, as it is widely seen as the first real test of two competing interpretations of recent changes to the law.

Peeling back the peer review process: It just wasn't true.  (Guardian)

Suddenly a plethora of positive psychology books began to appear, written by eminent psychologists. There was Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csizkszentmihalyi, who with Seligman is seen as the co-founder of the modern positive psychology movement; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment by Seligman himself. And of course Fredrickson's Positivity, approved by both Seligman and Csizkszentmihalyi. Each of them appeared to quote and promote one another, creating a virtuous circle of recommendation.
And these books were not only marketed like a previous generation of self-help manuals, they often shared the same style of cod-sagacious prose. "Positivity opens your mind naturally, like the water lily that opens with sunlight," writes Fredrickson in Positivity.
Then there was the lucrative lecture circuit. Both Seligman and Fredrickson are hired speakers. One website lists Seligman's booking fee at between $30,000 and $50,000 an engagement. In this new science of happiness, it seemed that all the leading proponents were happy.
But then Nick Brown started to ask questions.

Appropriations bill codifies Obama Administration Open Access directive (SPARC)

Progress toward making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible in a digital environment was reached today with Congressional passage of the FY 2014 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.  The bill requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the Omnibus bill with research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on federally funded research no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
“This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).  “We are indebted to the members of Congress who champion open access issues and worked tirelessly to ensure that this language was included in the Omnibus.  Without the strong leadership of the White House, Senator Harkin, Senator Cornyn, and others, this would not have been possible.”
The additional agencies covered would ensure that more than $31 billion of the total $60 billion annual U.S. investment in taxpayer-funded research is now openly accessible.
SPARC strongly supports the language in the Omnibus bill, which affirms the strong precedent set by the landmark NIH Public Access Policy, and more recently by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Directive on Public Access.  At the same time, SPARC is pressing for additional provisions to strengthen the language – many of which are contained in the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act – including requiring that articles are:

• Available no later than six months after publication;
• Available through a central repository similar to the National Institutes for Health’s (NIH) highly successful PubMed Central, a 2008 model that opened the gateway to the Human Genome Project and more recently the Brain Mapping Initiative.  These landmark programs demonstrate quite clearly how opening up access to taxpayer funded research can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, lead to both innovative new treatments and technologies, and generate new jobs in key sectors of the economy; and
• Provided in formats and under terms that ensure researchers have the ability to freely apply cutting-edge analysis tools and technologies to the full collection of digital articles resulting from public funding.

Scientific America: Open Access 2013

The Golden Age of Visual Story Telling (Psychology Today):

Considering most people today are too busy to read long articles anymore, do you think infographics could be a more efficient way for them to acquire information?
Infographics take advantage of our visual intelligence. So when they are done well they allow us to make sense of a large amount of information quickly. They can have real advantages over text. But writing is powerful in different ways. They are two different ways of conveying information and telling stories. One is not better than the other.

From Twitter
BBC News - Fridge sends spam emails as attack hits smart gadgets BBC
Catholic Church-owned German bookseller Weltbild files for insolvency Reuters 
Academic publishing: No peeking… Economist

Tech Therapy: Publishers Explain costs of Journal Publishing

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed a 20 minute interview with Fred Dylla, executive director at the American Institute of Physics, and Brian D. Scanlan, president of Thieme Publishers on the costs of publishing journals.

LINK to the article

Academic journals don’t happen by magic, and even online editions are expensive to produce in ways that scholars may not realize. That’s the argument by two scholarly publishers,  The two give their response to comments by our guest from last month’s show, a scholar who argued that in an online world journals should publish scholarly articles free online.

Download this recording as an MP3 file, or subscribe to Tech Therapy on iTunes.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 11): Phoenix Flames Out, Pompeii Exhibit, Springer, MOOCs + More

The Boston Phoenix closed down last week. (CJR):

But nobody was expecting the guillotine. I certainly wasn’t. As a longtime Phoenix reader and part-time Boston resident, I’m shocked and disconsolate. The Phoenix is and was one of the best alt-weeklies in the country. From its smart reporting on state and local politics to its tough, nuanced coverage of social justice issues, the Phoenix consistently exemplified the best of the alternative press. Staff writer Chris Faraone’s you-are-there coverage of the Occupy movement was honest, unsentimental, and indispensable; during last year’s presidential campaign, political writer David S. Bernstein offered valuable insight into the Romney cotillion. The paper’s departments were memorable, too—David Thorpe’s loopy The Big Hurt music column; Robert Nadeau’s authoritative restaurant reviews; Barry Thompson’s “Meet the Mayor” series of interviews with various local Foursquare “mayors;” the tenacious local arts coverage. All were lively and occasionally brilliant; all will be missed. 

That’s not to say that the paper was flawless. No publication is. But, from my perspective, the Phoenix’s successes far outnumbered its failures. More to the point, the Phoenix was a legitimately independent weekly in a space largely dominated by conglomerate corporate media. While other alt-weeklies across the country were acquired by national chains, the Phoenix remained resolutely rooted in New England. (The Boston Phoenix had two sister papers in Providence, RI, and Portland, ME, both of which will continue to publish.) Now, the only true alt-weekly in Boston is the wisecracking Weekly Dig, which has a huge opportunity if it plays its cards right. (Many current Phoenix staffers began their careers at the Dig.)

Looks like a fascinating show at the British Museum (where the world comes to see their stuff) about domestic life in Pompeii and Herculaneum (FT):

Paul Roberts, the exhibition’s curator, talks me through the lessons of the double portrait, found at the site of a bakery. “We assume he is the bakery owner. He wears a white toga, which may mean he is a candidatus for political office. But his wife is the amazing one. She is the one with the reckoning tablet. They are equal, and they are shown equal, standing together, members of a confident, mercantile class.  

“And this was the reality of life for a lot of Roman women. They wouldn’t have been little old ladies sitting at home. They were highly visible in society.” Roberts plays down their disenfranchisement. “Think of Edwardian England: no vote, no ability to stand for office but tons of money and tons of influence.”  This is the most complete show, Roberts believes, to illustrate the domestic life of the two cities. It is designed to show the riches that would have adorned the typical prosperous Roman household: its gardens, its dining rooms; its private jokes and its grandiloquent statements of self-importance. The Italian addiction to bella figura, he says, can be traced to the flamboyance of ancient Rome.

Also in the FT, the Springer sale is off earlier than expected since the offers from some selected potential buyers were less than expected. This can mean only one thing. (FT)

But earlier this year, EQT hinted that it may wait until later in the year to start a formal process, after price indications from potential buyers including German media group Bertelsmann fell short of expectations, people with knowledge of the matter said then.
The fact that it is now accelerating the sale process highlights a dramatic shift in sentiment among the largest private equity firms in Europe over the past two months, as debt funding for acquisitions increases amid an investors rush into high yield bonds.
However this time, Bertelsmann says it won’t bid for Springer Science. After signalling for months that it would have a look at the publisher if it went on sale, the German media group said it was no longer interested.

Slightly biased research (which they admit to) on how faculty feel about the MOOCs they have taught (Chronicle):

The findings are not scientific, and perhaps the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey. These early adopters of MOOCs have overwhelmingly volunteered to try them—only 15 percent of respondents said they taught a MOOC at the behest of a superior—so the deck was somewhat stacked with true believers. A few professors whose MOOCs have gone publicly awry did not respond to the survey.

But the participants were primarily longtime professors with no prior experience with online instruction. More than two-thirds were tenured, and most had taught college for well over a decade. The respondents were overwhelmingly white and male. In other words, these were not fringe-dwelling technophiles with a stake in upending the status quo.

Therefore the positive response may come as a surprise to some observers. Every year the Babson Survey Research Group asks chief academic administrators to estimate what percentage of their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education"; the average estimate in recent years has stalled at 30 percent, even as online programs have become mainstream.

Professors at top-ranked colleges are seen as having especially entrenched views. For years, "elite" institutions appeared to view online courses as higher education's redheaded stepchild—good enough for for-profit institutions and state universities, maybe, but hardly equivalent to the classes held on their own campuses. Now these high-profile professors, who make up most of the survey participants, are signaling a change of heart that could indicate a bigger shake-up in the higher-education landscape.

Also from Wired: Where are MOOCs really going? (Wired):

The initial MOOCs came from a “process business model” where companies bring inputs together at one end and transform them into a higher-value output for customers at the other end — as with the retail and manufacturing industries.

But over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a “facilitated network model”) will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses.

And from the twitter feed this week:
How International Pricing Strategy Affects Publisher Profitability EPubDirect
OCLC launches WorldShare Interlibrary Loan service in the US KnowledgeSpeak
Historical audio: Unforgotten songs Economist
Ray Cusick Economist The genius who invented the Daleks. They got him.
ProQuest to Distribute NewspaperARCHIVE to Libraries Worldwide Link

FASTR and Slower?: Proposed Open Access Bill

Yesterday the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) bill was introduced in Congress by U.S. Representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA), and Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and the sponsors say the bill is designed to increase the openness, transparency, and accessibility of publicly funded research results. The bill would require public publication/access to all federally funded research to be provided if the federal agency has a research budget of more that $100million. From Rep Lofgren's press release:

Specifically, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (Text:pdf) would:

• Require federal departments and agencies with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more, whether funded totally or partially by a government department or agency, to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscript that has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Ensure that the manuscript is preserved in a stable digital repository maintained by that agency or in another suitable repository that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.
• Require that each taxpayer-funded manuscript be made available to the public online and without cost, no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Require agencies to examine whether introducing open licensing options for research papers they make publicly available as a result of the public access policy would promote productive reuse and computational analysis of those research papers.

An identical Senate counterpart of this legislation is also being introduced today by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The federal government spends over $37Billion on federally funded research with most of this money spent by Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture. According to Lofgren:

"FASTR represents a giant step forward in making sure that the crucial information contained in these articles can be freely accessed and fully used by all members of the public," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing Academic Research Coalition (SPARC). "It has the potential to truly revolutionize the scientific research process."

This legislation would unlock unclassified research funded by agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

The bill builds on the success of the first U.S. mandate for public access to the published results of publicly funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented their public access policy. It is estimated that approximately 80,000 papers are published each year from NIH funds.

This is the fourth go-around for an open access bill but this one may have a better chance of getting to an eventual vote given the changing views on open access and therefore, more acceptance by members of Congress that this is something worth pursuing.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 4): Open Access UK, Tapscott on MOOCs, Personal Data Ownership +More

The fight over open access in the UK has been joined by David Willets, the governments Universities Ministers proclamation that all publicly funded research will be immediately publically available by 2014 (Guardian):

All the concerned groups said they agreed with providing easier access to academic research, but Professor Howard Hotson, a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, who sits on the steering council for the Council for the Defence of British Universities, said they all shared grave concerns at the pace of the changes being rolled out.

He said: "One of the things which flabbergasts me is the seemingly insatiable appetite for this government to pursue multiple radical changes simultaneously. It seems extraordinarily naive to suppose that on the basis of a few months of consultation, in a very short space of time, you can radically change the basic way in way academics communicate with each other without having a huge number of unintended knock-on consequences. Open access in principle has a great deal to be said for it, but it has to be handled with care."

Don Tapscott writing from Davos on The Week the University as we know it died (Globe&Mail):

But Mr. Summers is missing the point. From my perspective, we should eliminate all lectures as a method of instruction. Universities must shift their business model from the centuries-old notion that a professor lectures students, to a more collaborative, interactive model.

Any subject where students need to absorb fact-based material – that is, where there is a right or wrong answer – should be taught using computer-based learning. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” teachers should be the co-pilot for students as they explore and collaborate online to acquire knowledge. Without changing the model of pedagogy, the physical campus will not survive.

One can easily see a day when students treat all the universities as one big à-la-carte menu that can lead to something we could call a “MOOC degree.” Take some law courses at Harvard, economic courses at McGill, some engineering courses at MIT, and round out the degree with courses from Queen’s, Yale and the London School of Economics. The result will be students acquiring a better education by shopping around then they could have acquired at just the one institution. And it won’t take long before employers recognize this.

The biggest obstacle to this happening is the question of credentials. Aside from the couple of experiments I mentioned earlier, none of the prestigious universities will grant a course credit – let alone a degree – based on the strength of online courses.

Your body as a data factory (Guardian):

It's not quite right to say that internet users are giving away their information. Access to "free" services like Google or Facebook relies on a value exchange and it is your data that is being exchanged. A general haziness around what value that data represents means most people accept this deal. After all, would you be prepared to pay "real money" to fund your Google Chat habit? Research shows you're paying Google around $5,000 in personal data in exchange for its services. Given the option to pay that $5,000 via cash, credit or cookies, I imagine most people would plump for the cookies.

But things are changing. France's proposed data tax is unlikely to become law any time soon but the fact that it has been mooted is indicative of a gradual drive towards a more official quantification of data. This can already be seen in the slew of start-ups trying to help people transform their personal details into dollars: an industry which could be worth £1bn by 2016 in the UK alone. Now, it seems, governments are beginning to wonder if they too can cash in.

Where's the app that lets me monetize all my data?

Re-inventing Academic Publishing: 'Diamond' Open Access Titles That Are Free To Read And Free To Publish (TechDirt) but from the comments this time:

I am a librarian:
I am a librarian at a small four year university. What we pay for journal subscriptions varies widely from thirty or forty dollars a year for some mundane stuff, to several thousand a year for the hardcore upper level science and engineering. My most expensive subscription is $10,206 per year and it goes up every year. A typical price is between about $400 and $1,200. We only keep about 750 print titles, larger institutions often keep many more. Also, some of the titles that cost into the thousands might only be printed bimonthly or even quarterly, so you're looking at hundreds or even thousands of dollars per issue. People could steal our laptops and Kindles and it wouldn't hurt as bad as when some of the journals go missing.

Furthermore, because prices are generally based on FTE (full-time equivalency, or roughly the number of students we have), we pay only a modest fraction of what the larger universities pay. Also, you have to keep in mind that they count ALL students. We might have only a few hundred students in an upper level engineering or science program, but to get those subjects' journals they count EVERY student, right down to the slack-ass stoner freshmen and the absentee football majors.

Don't even get me started on the electronic journals and databases...

quote:
Also ask any university librarian how mush of their budget goes to Elsevier, also ask about the quality of some of the journals they end up buying because of bundling. Just make sure you escape route is open when you do so, you may provoke an angry reaction.

^^ Truth. ^^

Speaking of which what do the comments look like for a MOOC class you ask? (IHE)

From Twitter this week:

Pew Internet Releases New Report on Library Services (Plus Commentary) | Pew Center
Software patents 'a bit of a mess' says Martin Goetz, the first man to get one Guardian
New Exhibit Honors New York Public Library’s Massive Photo Archive: Wired NYTimes
Association of Research Libraries: Licensing E-Journal Bundles from Large Publishers: ARL Releases Pre-Pub from RLI 282 ARL News
For open access journals, price doesn’t buy influence Smart Planet
Amazon Touts Self-Publishing Benefits Front and Center: Publishers Weekly

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 44): McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Acquires, Open Access, TIme Mag's Education + More

Brian Kibby, President of McGraw Hill Higher Education interviewed in Inside Higher Ed

Question 4: It seems to me that in your position as president of McGraw-Hill higher education you have before you the very difficult task of leading an enormous change in how your company operates. For many many years the big educational publishes have made very good money with a model of printed books and digital add-ons. You are saying that by 2015 that traditional educational publisher model will be as dead as Blockbuster video, as dead as the old record stores. How are you going to transform your corporate culture and lead your employees to embrace this change? And why should we expect that any big traditional publisher will be able to evolve to embrace this new digital world, as there are not many very good models in other industries of other legacy companies making similar transitions.

Answer 4: McGraw-Hill Education is a company with over 100 years of experience in education, so obviously it’s a place with some history. But the world and the needs of our customers have changed dramatically, as has the technology now available to help satisfy their demands. Our team has embraced this change whole heartedly. Our culture has become one where we have a passion for creative disruption, especially as it relates to what is important to our customers: improved results, retention, and the ability to become even more competitive in the marketplace.

We’re focused on technology now in a way that we’ve never been before, but we still have that deep respect for content, and I think that our employees really appreciate that.

With regard to other models/industries, I think we’ve had something of a late-mover advantage. A lot is made about how education has lagged behind other areas in adopting technology, and I won’t go into that but to say that the more gradual transition in our space gave us the chance to sit down and really figure out the best way to do digital from a business perspective. Newspapers had to make that choice back in the mid-90s, and the music industry had to face it in the early 2000s. Like everyone else, we needed to figure out how to get people to think about digital as something you pay for, and our answer to that was to make digital products that were worth paying for. I think we’ve been able to do that pretty successfully, and the market has responded well.

Pearson announced its largest acquisition in over five years on Tuesday with the purchase of EmbanetCompass, a provider of digital services such as online degrees to leading non-profit colleges and universities in the US (FT).  From Embanet's website:

EmbanetCompass is the premier provider of online learning services and technological solutions for top-tier academic institutions. We are acutely aware of the dynamics that drive higher education and utilize our experience and expertise to assess, finance, develop, recruit for, market and support online learning solutions for our academic partners.

 A new study suggests that open access publishing is larger than expected (Guardian):

They should be encouraged by Laasko and Björk's study which, fittingly, is published in an open access journal. The Finnish researchers found not only that nearly 17% of research papers worldwide are now published in open access journals, a figure that is two to three times higher than was previously supposed, but also that the exponential rise in open access publishing shows no sign of slowing down.

In the UK, since about 35% of papers are reckoned to be made available through deposition in repositories — the green route — the total percentage of open access papers (52%) looks like it has crossed the half-way mark.

Time Magazine devotes most of its current issue to education.  Here is a sample on MOOCs (TIME)

To compare my online experience with a traditional class, I dropped into a physics course at Georgetown University, the opposite of a MOOC. Georgetown admitted only 17% of applicants last fall and, with annual tuition of $42,360, charges the equivalent of about $4,200 per class.
The university’s large lecture course for introductory physics accommodates 150 to 200 students, who receive a relatively traditional classroom experience — which is to say, one not designed according to how the brain learns. The professor, who is new to the course, declined to let me visit.
But Georgetown did allow me to observe Physics 151, an introductory class for science majors, and I soon understood why. This class was impressively nontraditional. Three times a week, the professor delivered a lecture, but she paused every 15 minutes to ask a question, which her 34 students contemplated, discussed and then answered using handheld clickers that let her assess their understanding. There was a weekly lab — an important component missing from the Udacity class. The students also met once a week with a teaching assistant who gave them problems designed to trip them up and had them work in small groups to grapple with the concepts.
The class felt like a luxury car: exquisitely wrought and expensive. Fittingly, it met in a brand-new, state-of-the-art $100 million science center that included 12 teaching labs, six student lounges and a café. It was like going to a science spa.
Elite universities like Georgetown are unlikely to go away in the near future, as even Udacity’s co-founder (and Stanford alum) David Stavens concedes. “I think the top 50 schools are probably safe,” he says. “There’s a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful.”

Where does that leave the rest of the country’s 4,400 degree-granting colleges? After all, only a fifth of freshmen actually live on a residential campus. Nearly half attend community colleges. Many never experience dorm life, let alone science spas. To return to reality, I visited the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) — a school that, like many other colleges, is not ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

Disruption in the news business from Nieman Report:

With history as our guide, it shouldn't be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.

They are classic disruptors.

Disruption theory argues that a consistent pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field establish a foothold at the low end and move up the value network—eating away at the customer base of incumbents—by using a scalable advantage and typically entering the market with a lower-margin profit formula.

It happened with Japanese automakers: They started with cheap subcompacts that were widely considered a joke. Now they make Lexuses that challenge the best of what Europe can offer.

It happened in the steel industry, where minimills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry's giants.

In the news business, newcomers are doing the same thing: delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. The newcomers aren't burdened by the expensive overheads of legacy organizations that are a function of life in the old world. Instead, they've invested in only those resources critical to survival in the new world. All the while, they have created new market demand by engaging new audiences.

Economist Profiles Springer's Digitization Efforts

The Economist takes a look at how Springer has approached the digitization of their entire backlist/archive of books. They already provide electronic access to 50,000 titles published since 2005 but now they are looking at the remaining archive of 65,000 titles. Springer has been at the forefront of book digitization efforts and some may remember in the early days of the Google Scholar effort they were frequently the most active participants in panel discussions on the subject. (Economist):

Scanning Springer's backlist proved no mean feat. First, the company had to figure out for which works Springer holds copyright, surveying records at all the firms swept up in recent years, says Thijs Willems, who heads the book-archiving project. To create a definitive list his group scoured old catalogs and national libraries. They eventually assembled an archive of 100,000 print books in English, Dutch and German, many of which were different editions of the same work. The firm arranged access from libraries to those that Springer had lost due to the vagaries of time, war, etc. It decided to scan only the last available edition of a given work; earlier editions might be added to the trove in the future.

and they end with this,

Springer has painstakingly produced the highest possible quality of scans, principally to avoid having to start from scratch when today's viewing technology is superseded by something dramatically better. Mr Willems and his team also embedded rich metadata—details like author, date of publication, number of pages, and so on—in standard formats which are likely to persist for a while. They took especial care in reproducing illustrations. These digital books are, after all, meant to last for ever.

Beyond the Book: How Social Media is Keeping Alive the Journal Article

From CCC's Beyond to Book series, How Social Media is Keeping Alive the Journal Article:

Scholarly communication is rapidly changing, and information managers in private companies and other sectors are finding new ways to serve their users. Social media, mobile devices, data mining, semantic technologies and other developments are creating a whole new environment for publishing. Yet the old standby – the journal article— seems to have no real rival yet. 

In this edition of special programming from RightsDirect, CCC’s European subsidiary, Madrid-based Victoriano Colodrón speaks with Hervé Basset, a Paris-based expert in scientific information management, who blogs in English and French, and is currently writing a book on social media for the pharmaceutical industry.

Basset tells Colodron how the increasing professional use of social media by company researchers is influencing the use of more traditional sources of information, including scientific journals. He also explains why the growing use of social media is changing the role and the work of corporate information professionals. 

Link to the Audio

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MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 37): Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

The New York Times takes up the issue of "pricy" scholarly journals and leads with their view point (NYT):

After decades of healthy profits, the scholarly publishing industry now finds itself in the throes of a revolt led by the most unlikely campus revolutionaries: the librarians.

Whoever pays the bills, publishing is not free. Under the traditional business model most of the costs were met by subscribers, though some journals do also charge contributors, making scholarly publishing one of the most consistently profitable, if least noticed, corners of the business. Elsevier, for example, reported profits of £724 million on revenues of £2 billion last year alone. According the Mr. Suber converting to open access “will involve some cost shifting, But also considerable cost savings” for libraries and university budgets.

The traditional model does have its defenders. After George Monbiot, a British academic and journalist, published an article in The Guardian newspaper last month calling academic publishers “ruthless capitalists,” Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at the London-based Publishers’ Association, told the journal Times Higher Education that all publishers “aspire to universal access” but that it would take time to find a “sustainable, scalable, funded” way to achieve it.

Writers at the Scholarly Kitchen blog, who are mostly involved in the less commercial end of publishing, said that although subscriptions for popular titles might be expensive, the cost for each individual reader remained very low.

They also noted that many titles with high fees for American or European readers were available free or at lower costs to researchers in the developing world through the Hinari program, a partnership of the World Health Organization and several major publishers including Elsevier, John Wiley and Blackwell.

Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning, an organization that helps developing countries improve access to education, said such efforts did not go nearly far enough. “One of the major obstacles to education in the developing world is the lack of high quality teaching materials,” he said. “The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.”

“I’ve seen it from both sides,” said Sir John, who was once briefly on the board of Blackwell. “I saw the vast industry built up from publicly funded research, and it was never clear to me what value was being added. But if you needed the material, they had you over a barrel.”

On the whole this article meanders and doesn't offer any insight. The author notes the Elsevier profit numbers as de facto proof that academic publishers are blood-suckers.

Appreciation for Michael Hart the founder of Project Gutenberg from the Observer:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault. He never made much money, repaired his own car, had scant faith in medicine and built most of his own electronic gear from stuff he picked up in garage sales. On Saturday mornings over breakfast in the local diner, he would work out the optimum route to cover the maximum number of garage sales that day; it was his version of the travelling salesman problem in mathematics.In his obituary of Hart, his colleague Gregory Newby described him as an "unreasonable" man, in George Bernard Shaw's celebrated use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

From the Economist: It's good to have gatekeepers (Economist):

The more general question, however, is whether publishers like Amazon (and particularly Amazon) represent a threat to the older magazine model, in which a variety of articles are bundled together and sold for a price that, even on the newsstand, is lower than what a reader would expect to pay if buying everything piecemeal. Part of the reason readers buy magazines is because they are comfortable outsourcing some of the decision-making about content delivery, and welcome the fact that magazines curate the news. The last issue of the New Yorker, for example, included articles about Mr Perry, the gold standard, tarot cards, Wikipedia, Syria, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, and Rin Tin Tin.

According to the Economist there are a raft of regional literary festivals going on in Asia. I need an invite. (Economist):

In contrast to bleak conditions in Western book markets, the Indian divisions of international publishers are busy signing up new authors. London’s literary agencies have opened offices in India. Namita Gokhale, a novelist and one of the Jaipur festival’s organisers, says that South Asia is having a “literary moment”. It is “exploring its place in a new world” in English, while also maintaining traditions in the region’s native languages. She believes making sense of South Asia’s many upheavals has something to do with the outbreak of writing and reading.

Fellow traveler Peter Brantley is now writing for Publishers Weekly. Here on defining "library" (PW):

We are now engaged in acts of social reconstruction. Just as digital networks have forced us to deeply question the role of publishers, they also force us to reconsider the role and purpose of libraries, which developed in the modern era around the presumption of the Industrial Age book right along with publishing. A library fills many needs in its community; it is an after-school day care and gaming center, an employment hall and meeting space, offering shelter and privacy. It has also been a place with shelf upon shelf of CDs, newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, our understanding of libraries is so bound up in the physical world that their presumptive value has most often been measured through a single proxy: how many books they hold.

Statement from Paul Courant of the University of Michigan in response to the Authors Guild suit against scanning (UM):

“The University of Michigan library has been digitizing books for more than 20 years Sections 108 and 107 of the federal Copyright Act provide the guidance and the authority for this work, which supports our ability to preserve and to lawfully use the collections that we have purchased and maintained. Moreover, our digitization efforts enable us to make works accessible to people who have print disabilities because the overwhelming majority of works have never been available in an accessible format.

And from the twitter this week.

From InfoBoy: New Report from EU: Electronic Clearance of Orphan Works Significantly Accelerates Mass Digitization: Link

IBM starts its own NYC high school: http://bit.ly/qvl4Ad

Pearson buys virtual school co for $400 million | Reuters uk.reuters.com/article/2011/0…

....

And in sports, Lancashire County Cricket Club which hasn't won a championship for 77 years won one this week on a squeaker end to the season. For Mr PND Senior who is Chairman of the Club, I think this is almost a crowning achievement. And, they get to go to the Palace. (MEveningNews)

Beyond the Book with Elsevier's Rafael Sidi

From his beyond the book series, Chris Kennealy interviews Rafael Sidi, Elsevier VP of Product Management for Applications Marketplace and Developer Network.

“We are letting [researchers] play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build. In the end, scientists and researchers know their problem better than us.”

Sidi cited a variety of innovative application efforts, including for SciVerse, which offers developers access to Elsevier content, and the community driven projects Apps for Science Challenge and Apps for Library Idea Challenge. (Interview)

Some clips from the transcript of the interview:

So what we are trying to do with the data, we want to give access to our data as we’ve been giving, to make that data easily remixable, reusable among the developers. And wanting that, I’ve been saying that if we let the data to be used by the scientists, by the researchers within our environment, they are going to be able to create much, much better solutions. They are going to be able to create solutions that we couldn’t have imagined.

So what we are doing is just we are going to the crowd. We are letting them play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build, because at the end, scientists and researchers, they know their problem better than us, in some cases, and what we are doing, we are giving them the tools and we are providing the services for them in this application and developer network in our framework so that they can build using our services and tools.

....

Good question. What we are trying to do right now is to reach out to the community, to the crowd. We’ve been doing different challenges. I mentioned we had a challenge at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Our first one was at New Jersey Institute of Technology. And what we are doing right now, currently we have two different challenges going on.

One, we call it Apps for Science. It’s a challenge among six countries where we are asking developers to submit applications and then we are giving them prizes. And the other challenge that we are doing among our librarians, Apps for Library. So we are asking to librarians to submit ideas. And we are going to – again, a judging committee is going to pick the ideas and then what we are planning to do, some of the ideas we are going to go to our developer network and develop, and those ideas are going to be developed by the developer network.

So, so far, we’ve seen an excellent biomedical image search application that is going to be built by the University of Madison, Wisconsin. So we are getting some ideas that we haven’t thought about it.Just recently, we launched a new app from a company called iSpeech and the app takes the text and then translates to words, so you can just hear the text. And that’s also very important for us in terms of accessibility to the content, making the content easily accessible to everyone. So I if I have an impairment, then I can listen to the text.

Re-post: Massive Data Sets

Originally posted June 24th, 2008

Large publishers like Elsevier, Macmillan and Kluwer spent the past 20-30 years or so consolidating journal publishing under their umbrellas and building virtually unassailable positions in numerous vertical publishing segments. The open access movement has had only minimal impact on the prospects for these businesses and there is little indication even market forces will reduce their commanding positions. Much of the consolidation has occurred but occasionally, some large concentration of journals comes on the market however, it is unlikely that a new publisher would be able to build a significant position in any meaningful segment because all the important titles already belong to one of the major players.

Journals publish the outcome of the intellectual activity of the article authors. In some cases, access is provided to the data that serves to back up the investigation but invariably this data remains in the dark. Some publishers have experimented with allowing journal readers to play with the data but this does not appear to be a developing trend. Data's day may come however. Several months ago (via Brantley) I read of yet another initiative at Google.

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com/, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

The article on their web site is brief and my immediate thoughts had little to do with the gist of this story. My immediate thought was that here could develop the next land grab for publishers and perhaps other parties interested in gaining access to the raw data supporting all types of research. As publishers develop platforms supporting their publishing and (n0w) service offers will they see maintaining these data sets as integral to that policy? I believe so, and I suspect in agreements with authors, institutions and associations that own these journals the publishers like Elsevier will also require the 'deposit' of the raw data supporting each article. In return, the offerings on the publisher's 'platform' would enable analysis, synthesis and data storage all of benefit to their authors. But the story may be more comprehensive than simply rounding out their existing titles with more data.

The current power publishers in the journal segment may find themselves competing with new players including Google in thier efforts to gain access to data sets that may have been historically supplemental or even not considered relevant to research. In addition, sources of massive data sets are growing with the introduction of every new consumer product and exponential web traffic growth. In the NYTimes today is an article about a number of new companies that are analyzing massive amounts of data to produce market reports and business analysis. From the article:

Just this month, the journal Nature published a paper that looked at cellphone data from 100,000 people in an unnamed European country over six months and found that most follow very predictable routines. Knowing those routines means that you can set probabilities for them, and track how they change. It’s hard to make sense of such data, but Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

As noted in the article, the data (growing rapidly to massive status) has been hard to manipulate but this issue is diminishing rapidly. As it diminishes we will see more and more companies, groups and even individuals note the value of their data and begin to negotiate the access to this data. All of the large information publishers will see themselves playing a significant role in this market as they gather data sets around market segments just as they did with journals. If they don't do this they could undercut the value of their journal collections if they are forced to separate the result/analysis from the data. Signing agreements for access to these data sets (cell phone data in the example above) will enable Journal publishers to concentrate research even further by making access to this information a pre-condition to publication in the respective journal. Either way, the providers of these data sets are likely to be looking at a new and significant revenue source.

Elsevier Introduces SciVerse

I've mentioned that information and academic publishers are starting to open up their data to third party applications providers and, in the process, enable greater utility for their subscribers and users. SciVerse, announced today by Elsevier, is a platform for doing just that. For a publisher of this size and importance to academics, professionals and institutions this initiative should be considered quite important as it represents a significant (and logical) step in the evolution of information database publishing.

As the press release states, SciVerse is "an innovative platform that integrates the company's key products and encourages the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customized search and discovery applications. Elsevier has committed to releasing the APIs (application programming interfaces) for all of the content on SciVerse and will offer application development support tools on the site."

SciVerse will be impressive from the start and will incorporate ScienceDirect, Scopus and targeted web content from Scirus, Elsevier's science-specific Internet search engine. Built into the platform will be some basic but useful technology which will enable efficient cross database searching and other functionality, but what Elsevier is banking on (and, it seems a pretty safe bet given the quality of this content) is that third party application providers will provide significant ingenuity in building applications that Elsevier's subscribers will find useful. As Jay Katzen, Managing Director, Academic & Government Products, Elsevier notes,

"SciVerse is a start of a new journey for Elsevier where we plan to provide customized search and discovery solutions and increase interoperability within our products and third party services. We recognize that it is critical to involve the researchers and librarians in the creation of solutions as they are in the best position to identify and address their search and discovery challenges. By providing our content APIs later this year, we will empower researchers and developers to build custom applications to enhance their workflow and share these applications with the scientific community within SciVerse."

Elsevier will open up SciVerse to the developer community (many of whom are likely to be their subscribers) later in the year and the mechanism for doing this isn't clear; however, it is likely that their will be some type of registration and/or approval process similar to the Apple apps store process. Whether or how Elsevier will share in revenues that may be generated by some of these new apps is also unclear; however, should this be a practical outcome of this initiative it may end up driving some substantial incremental revenue for Elsevier. Most importantly though, this initiative will ultimately tie Elsevier content even firmer into the workflow and processes of their customers as these applications address specific problems for customers. This aspect shouldn't be under valued as an important contributor to the continued growth of the Elsevier product line. It will be interesting to see how other information and academic publishers react to this news.

Springer introduces new open access journals

In 2008, Springer acquired open access publisher BioMed Central amid worries the publisher would curtail the open access model despite claims at the time that they viewed open access as a viable business model and expected to expand the operation. This week, the company announced an expansion of the open access model to all disciplines under the trade name SpringerOpen.

From their press release:

SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com) will cover all disciplines within the science, technology and medicine (STM) fields and will be offered in cooperation with BioMed Central. The entire content of SpringerOpen journals – including research articles, reviews, and editorials – are fully and immediately open access, and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. No subscription is needed.

“We are seeing an increasing interest from our authors and from funders in all areas for open access publishing options and have responded to a need in the current market,” said Wim van der Stelt, EVP Business Development, Springer. “We are happy to serve our authors and editorial boards with the publishing options they want and are also pleased to supply universities, research institutions and our other patrons with the ability to use this content online freely and conveniently.”

SpringerOpen journals are e-only journals. Springer is committed to delivering high-quality articles and ensuring rapid publication as with its traditional journals, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process. The final articles are not only published in a timely manner on Springer’s online information platform SpringerLink, but are also distributed to archives such as PubMed Central and to institutional repositories as requested.

SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights. The journals ask the authors to pay an article-processing charge, in accordance with market standards.

BioMed Central, acquired in 2008 by Springer, will provide its expertise and technology to help establish the SpringerOpen portfolio. SpringerOpen journals will publish in emerging and interdisciplinary fields and will complement both the established Springer journal portfolios and BioMed Central’s growing list of over 200 life science and biomedicine journal titles. Furthermore, in order to reduce the financial burden faced by individual authors, Springer and BioMed Central are collaborating to extend BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership scheme, offered to institutions, societies, groups, funders and corporations, to include the SpringerOpen titles. More than 300 institutional open access membership arrangements are currently in place.

Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees.

BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has been part of Springer Science+Business Media since 2008. Founded in 1999, the STM publisher has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is the largest open access publisher in the world.

"Predatory" Open Access Publishing

In the early days of the on-line self-publishing revolution when companies like Xlibris, iUniverse, Author House and Publish America were vying for the attentions of authors of all stripes there occured the inevitable 'bad experiences'. Authors making use of some self-publishing companies were taken to the cleaners with bad contracts, poorly printed books, content they couldn't gain access to and a host of other things. Online research into the experiences of others now enables more recent self-publishers to avoid the rookie mistakes and nefarious companies.

That's not the case in the Open Access Journal market which according to a recent article in the Charleston Advisor is seeing a rash of so called OA journal publishers preying on researchers for their content. They are up to many of the same tricks that some of the early book self-publishing companies got up to that left customers frustrated, disappointed and poorer.

In the article entitled 'Predatory' Open Access Scholarly Publishers, the author takes a close look at nine companies that are offering questionable services. They conclude:

These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit. They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards. If you subscribe to any professional e-mail lists, you likely have received some of these solicitations. Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer-review. In fact, in most cases, their peer review process is a façade. None of these publishers mentions digital preservation. Indeed, any of these publishers could disappear at a moment’s notice, resulting in the loss of its content. While we were researching this review, one publisher, Academic Journals, was hacked and the site replaced with radical Islamic propaganda for about a week.

Why would authors pay to have an article published when there are so many free outlets where they could publish, including free Open-Access journals? In many cases, the answer is that the quality of the articles is poor, and they were rejected by the mainstream journals.
...
Predatory publishers use words such as “Academic” and “Scientific” in their names to falsely add a veneer of legitimacy to their business. Practices such as these, according to Harnad, “are now being taken to a grotesque extreme because of the ease of entry into online publishing and a perceived instability in the traditional journal publishing trade, owing to the growing clamor for OA.”

Boston University Discuss Open Access

In the University's alumni magazine this quarter, Boston University discuss their recently launched open access research repository under a title "Research Wants to be Free":

While most published scholarly work is copyrighted and distributed by subscription-based journals, an open-access system allows an article or data to be shared as widely and easily as possible with both the public and potential collaborators who might build on one another’s work. The movement began a few years ago among university librarians unsettled by ever-rising subscription costs and emboldened by the promise of the Internet. It quickly spread to university faculty and has since spawned a bur­geoning library of open-access journals and institutional repositories. In Feb­ruary, Boston University moved to the forefront of the movement when the faculty unanimously voted to establish the nation’s first university-wide open-access archive.

The archive will be a free, search­able Web catalogue of BU scholarship ranging from neuroscience research to folk dance videos. Faculty who opt to use the archive can submit a journal article, a dissertation, or any other piece of scholarship, and material that is submitted will be made available to anyone for noncommercial use.

Elsevier's Journal of The Future

Journal publisher Elsevier has announced a beta project to re-think the journal article. In collaboration with their journal Cell, the company's innovation team has set up two beta sites that solicit feedback on how technology can improve the experience of both the journal contributor and the consumer.

Elsevier is the world's largest publisher of scientific and medical content and its results from what they describe as the 'journal of the future' will be watched closely by subscribers and competitors.

The concept attempts to make impressive use of current technology to aid the navigation of the journal article content, to provide more graphical and multimedia content and enable better and more effective linking to related content.

In summary, there are some of the features the publisher notes on the Cell beta site:

• A hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers of content based on their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure.
• A graphical abstract allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the main take-home message of the paper. The graphical abstract is intended to encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests.
• Research highlights provide a bulleted list of the key results of the article.
• Author-Affiliation highlighting makes it easy to see an author’s affiliations and all authors from the same affiliation.
• A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures.
• Integrated audio and video let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively.
• The Experimental Procedures section contains alternate views allowing readers to see a summary or the full details necessary to replicate the experiment.
• A new approach to displaying figures allows the reader to identify quickly which figures they are interested in and then drill down through related supplemental figures. All supplemental figures are displayed individually and directly linked to the main figure to which they are related.
• Real-time reference analyses provide a rich environment to explore the content of the article via the list of citations.

Here is the link to the beta version of the journal itself. (Cell Beta).

Swets Launch iPhone Access for 11,000 Journals

An interesting announcement from Swets that the contents of their journals database are available via the Apple iPhone and iTouch. Swets is a subscriptions management company serving the library and academic communities. It is not completely clear from this press release what additional functionality exists versus accessing the content via a browser.

Swets is pleased to announce SwetsWise Online Content can be accessed through the Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch. Powered by SwetsWise Subscriptions, SwetsWise Online Content is a single point of contact to one of the most extensive collections of electronic journals currently available in the scholarly information market.

SwetsWise Online Content provides users with access to direct links for more than 11,000 journal titles − all from a seamless Web interface and through the convenience of their Personal Digital Assistant. Information users can search relevant online content, utilize multi-level linking, download subscription lists and much more.

“I am delighted SwetsWise Online Content is accessible through the iPhone and iPod Touch,” states Jose Luis Andrade, Swets North America President. “Now, SwetsWise Online Content users can effortlessly gain instant access to e-journals. This is one of the many ways Swets is in-sync to the world’s ever-changing technologies and supplying information users with innovative electronic solutions that help further support their organizations.”

SwetsWise Online Content offers over 25 million searchable references along with links to full-text articles through an intuitive Web interface. This service also provides informative usage statistics on each title, and includes fast access set-up for new electronic journal subscriptions.

In addition to SwetsWise Online Content, SwetsWise Subscriptions is also available through the iPhone and iPod Touch. Information users can manage their subscriptions, view publication schedules, check the title status to thousands of print and electronic content and many other SwetsWise Subscriptions functions.

The Apple iPhone 3G also support WiFi, a standard wireless connection that allows SwetsWise Online Content and SwetsWise Subscriptions access using IP authentication. Customers can easily facilitate research and view e-content.