Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
Date:
1996
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    138/324 (page 440)
    14 May 1996] [Continued Chairman contd.] costs of a publisher are in the refereeing and editorial operation. “Going electronic”, as they say, does bring new and exciting opportunities but should not be seen as a quick fix for financial problems, if scientific standards are to be maintained. For example, one of our concerns is that of maintaining an electronic archive, which is not likely to be cheap, and the costs of which will somehow have to be recovered. Thank you, my Lord Chairman. Lord Flowers 697. Could I ask you a number of questions on what you have said. Firstly, why did you decide to publish electronically in January when there are so many problems that you have described which are still unresolved? (Mrs Dixon) Firstly our objective as an Institute is to disseminate information in physics. We knew that possibly of all the sciences, physicists are experienced and heavy Internet users. Our research did indicate that the demand existed and that in the main they had the equipment which enabled them to use this. We chose all of our journals because our research indicated that what they wanted was a breadth of coverage within the given subjects. Finally, of course, our experience in our trial period had indicated we might be able to stem or halt the attrition of institutional sales with the advent of electronic journals. 698. Are other scientific disciplines or engineering professions, medical professions following? (Mrs Dixon) They are following, some are at a similar level and some are slightly further behind. 699. Could I ask you what advantage you intend to take of the electronic format? Are you considering publishing exclusively electronically, no paper copy at all and are you thinking of such fancy tricks as making reference to hypertext and so on? (Mrs Dixon) Absolutely, yes we are. Currently our electronic journals offer on-line services such as searching, alerting, E-Mail links and usage reporting but the future holds some quite exciting opportunities for us. We are going to launch the next version of electronic journals which we will call version 1.1 in June. That will include some improved navigation methods, individual profiling so that the user can have a much clearer profile and obtain the information more quickly, what we call virtual filing cabinets, possibly not to replace the great banks of filing cabinets in the rest of the system, links to errata, corrigenda and addenda and we are hoping to have all this up very shortly. The longer term plans do indeed include what we call Intercite, which is the hypertext linking of references. We are embarking now on quite serious discussions with fellow Organisations such as the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. 700. Finally, how does what you are doing in the United Kingdom compare with what is going on in other countries amongst learned societies? _ (Mrs Dixon) In the world of physics it is quite interesting that we have taken a very defined route, electronic journals, some of our other partners societies and fellow societies in other territories have chosen to address other aspects of electronic publishing. So for instance one may well be concentrating on archiving issues, another may be concentrating on the creation of databases and we do all seem to be taking quite independent routes. Chairman 701. Many people would argue that learned societies over recent years have profited enormously from their publishing programmes and _ those programmes have become the mainstays of their financial success but the value the learned societies add to publishing and all of this is essentially tied up with the refereeing, editing procedures and with the archiving of material afterwards and then there are some ancillary things like the provision of abstracting services and so on. All of these seem to a degree to be under threat as you move towards electronic publication. Are you actively explaining not only to your membership, because the pages of your journals are not only restricted to your membership but to your clients in general, what value you will be adding to electronic publication that will make it worthwhile for them to continue to pay you money for it? (Mrs Dixon) In terms of the membership question perhaps Dr Jones would like to answer that. (Dr Jones) Yes, my Lord Chairman. It is true that as an Institute we have depended and still do depend to a great degree on the income we receive from our publishing operations. Indeed, if we did not have an income from publishing, many of our programmes would have to be curtailed. But I think it is important to realise and it is realised within the physics community in the United Kingdom, that the money is ploughed back into physics to support physics in schools, to support physics in universities and to support standards in degrees. I have to say that we have some problems convincing people in other parts of the world that this is so, but they do accept that we are a not-for-profit publisher. If I might say something about the second part of your question, as Anne Dixon mentioned, and is mentioned in our evidence to you, some 50 to 80 per cent of the costs of producing a journal lie in the refereeing and the quality assurance procedures. Indeed, we are doing our best to try and convince our readers, physicists worldwide, that in fact the supply of electronic journals on-line cannot be free. We must somehow cover the costs involved. (Mrs Dixon) I would just add we have obviously consulted widely before embarking on such a bold step and we very much had emphatic feedback that this was what our users wanted and our members wanted. Indeed this has been very much part of our way of moving forward. Chairman] There are some areas, particularly in physics, where less formal publishing is growing a pace and Lady Hogg would like to return to the earlier question.