A Workshop organised by The Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum, with support from DGXII of the Commission of the European Communities, and held at CAB International, Wallingford, Oxon, UK, October 1996
Storing and accessing the future primary journal - "an electronic setting in stone" -- Pieter van Wiechen
The role of the publisher is central to many of the issues raised during these presentations. But what does the publisher do in these revolutionary times?
It may come as a shock, but the new technologies will not change the publishing process; although they might change the way these activities are carried out. There is still a role for publishers and we will continue to see the constituent pieces of the publishing process such as:
* Find Sources and Verify Content
* Structure and Focus Content
* Select Medium and Format
* Provide Access Mechanisms
* Create Audience
* Enable Archiving
* Enhance Reputation
being handled.
To do these, the publisher will continue to use the concepts of the traditional building blocks - with the new tools at hand allowing a far larger audience to be reached:
|
Paper way |
Process |
Electronic way |
|
hand-writing |
Science Creation |
word processing |
|
mail |
Editorial Process |
network |
|
hand-correction |
Production Process |
electronic desk editing |
|
mail |
Distribution Delivery |
network |
|
browsing |
Science Consumption |
electronic interaction |
Thus the publisher will go through the same conceptual processes of manufacture, and continue to aim for the same types of use.
However, one thing will change in STM publishing, namely, that while traditionally this area dealt with a circular market - the readers and authors were often the same people and peer groups - increasingly, the reader now has different needs from the author. Also, the new information technologies will allow a huge expansion of the audience to take place.
The scope of the central library is, in most institutes and companies, increasingly being restricted. The range of products, the number of publishers, and the splintering of markets has made it increasingly difficult to carry sufficient titles to cover the user's R&D and business needs. But new technologies will supplement the library services. Most publishers now accept that a comprehensive collection of material drawn from a variety of publishers and divided among primary, secondary, and tertiary information sources, can be offered online to the full market. The publishers will hold their own "libraries" of articles and products and these will be combined by the new technologies so that the user can access a wider range of products and subjects. After all, individual journals are poor performers when it comes to getting a unified theme across to a reader and a collection of articles, from a collection of titles, will satisfy the reader who is investigating a particular, specified, topic far more.
Even so, "packaging" will increasingly reflect the profiling of material for particular audiences and these packages will be delivered to the desktop PC: thus the library will come to the user and not vice versa.
However, there will be changes and new challenges to be met. Many of these will deal with copyright and the economics of publishing; and it is also essential that the publishing process allows these changes to take place. The publisher will have to "supply on demand" and use multimedia and other techniques so that projects compete and offer different presentations and mixes: for instance, sound, text, graphics, animation. This means that publishers will have to tailor their production processes to allow a variety of products to be produced from the core input. The output will be user-driven and taken from a database of material that has been produced in a standard way with facilities for interactive retrieval.
The publishing world will therefore increasingly work with standard building blocks which can be merged into novel products. At the same time the publishing industry will need to offer better and better access tools and they will have to accept pay-on-demand supplementing the present subscription models as well as supplying rapid delivery solutions. The present "grey communities" will become increasingly important as they will mount and use information - some of these communities will form their own peer review groups with acceptable standards and there is a good chance that we will see a repeat of the processes that led to the first (paper) journals - small groups of specialists reviewing their own scientific papers which they exchange on the Internet.
Nevertheless, with so much concern about quality and linking and validation and the need for this long term availability of scientific information, the publisher will continue in his central role carrying out tasks to retain the integrity of validated contributions such as:
* Maintain Integrity of Publication
* Guard the Publishing Moment for Validated Publication Components
* Provide Back volume material (an electronic back volume approach for products derived from Validated Publication Components will not be feasible and the publisher must be able to regenerate derived products from the internal systems which will carry contents in a standard format)
* Retain Product Specification and Conversion Specification and regenerate products by the Rerun of Programs.
Ultimately, the publisher ensures that the scientific contribution is placed and stored in the right place in the "Wall of Science", securing it for future generations to access, utilise and build upon. This will continue.