What does the future hold for Scientific & Technical Publishing?

Jean Fisher

On a balmy, spring-like day, twenty-five members of the SLA Philadelphia Chapter, Drexel student chapter, and guests gathered at Drexel’s Hagerty Library. Others attended online via AdobeConnect, an option SLA-PHL has been offering since merging with the Central PA chapter.

Our speaker was Jean Fisher, an SLA colleague and principal at Vantage Information Services, where she provides taxonomy services, market research, and competitive intelligence for the publishing community.

Jean described trends in sci/tech publishing and encouraged audience members to contribute their own experience with these trends:
Trend 1: Open access authors are archiving their own publications using tools such as DSpace. Journals are using various open access (OA) plans such as dual access or delayed access (free after embargo period), author fees to support OA, partial OA (some articles free), and inexpensive access for developing countries. DOAJ, PLOS, Highwire, and Google Scholar were mentioned as examples.

Trend 2: Alternatives to traditional database search. These involve text mining, semantic tools, natural language, and pattern recognition. The emphasis is on finding information, not articles. One product mentioned in this context was Thomson Reuters’ Data Analyzer, which uses text mining. An obstacle Jean mentioned is disambiguation; her example was the term “biomarker”, which has different meanings in different disciplines. In the past, all the “good” information was in big databases that librarians were good at searching; now there are others like Elsevier’s Scopus. Google Scholar hopes to bridge them all.

Trend 3: Social media. Examples: Elsevier’s 2Collab, AIP’s UniPHY GoToMeeting, These encourage sharing of information, literature citations, and collaboration via remote attendance at meetings. Wiley’s WIRES product offers collaborative, interdisciplinary reviews.

Trend 4: The Asia factor. The percentage of scientific publications originating in Asia is increasing, while US percentage is declining.

Trend 5: New workflow & decision support tools. BizInt, a company that has been around since the early 90s, is now seeing competition. Examples for business include DiscoveryLogic and MedTrack, which attempt to make sense of large data sets — finding patterns and trends using techniques like visualization – to solve business problems. In science, Jean mentioned Reaxys (synthetic chemistry) and MDL (molecular structures). In publishing, new tools include online submission and automatic reference verification.

Trend 6: New STM journal formats for digital distribution. XML, doi, z39.84, ePub, etc. Some lower costs; others permit sale in multiple formats (including e-readers), handle rights management and raw data publication, or allow custom journals for instruction. Jean suggested that purchase of single articles, instead of buying an entire journal, is likely to grow.

Trend 7: Well, she hopes this won’t be a trend. Manipulation of medical research publication. Ghostwriting by pharmaceutical companies; marketing tools posing as academic journal (Elsevier Australasian Journal… marketing Vioxx)/articles. Most of the publishers have been involved and are now attempting to improve their editorial policies.

Trend 8: New areas of inquiry and research. New content areas: global warming, population growth, mobile communication, energy production (hydrogen-based vs oil-based), biomedical control over the genetic process of life.

This was a thought-provoking program. We look forward to hearing from Jean in the future, tracking these trends that will have important effects on the way medical librarians do their work.

Martha Z. Kirby
Coordinator
Queen Lane Library
Drexel University Health Sciences Libraries
Philadelphia, PA
mk56@drexel.edu

Gary Kaplan
Senior Librarian, Information Services
Scott Memorial Library
Thomas Jefferson University
Philadelphia, PA
gary.kaplan@jefferson.edu