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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140 - 153)

MONDAY 8 MARCH 2004

DR JULIA KING, MRS SALLY MORRIS AND MR MARTIN RICHARDSON

  Q140  Mr Key: The Institute of Physics noted the growth in plagiarism and I wondered what measures you were taking as publishers in the not-for-profit sector to protect against plagiarism.

  Dr King: One of the areas we have in the past relied on is peer review. One of the benefits that electronic publishing as we go forward will give us will be that once our back catalogue is all electronic, it will be possible to start to search for large chunks of identical text, things like that, just as in university teaching and in MSc theses some universities are now finding they have to search to check students have not copied great chunks from the internet. There will be additional services as well as the peer review and the conventional approaches we have today, which we will be looking at for the future.

  Q141  Mr Key: This is clearly going to be a growing problem in the age of Cut and Paste. What specific measures are you taking? You say things are going to happen to make sure there are big electronic searches. What specifically are you doing as not-for-profit publishers?

  Dr King: At the moment the biggest quality threshold is good choice of your reviewers, having editors and publishers who have a really good knowledge of the field and can choose as reviewers people who themselves will have as good a knowledge as you can find of the field, who are likely to notice if somebody is quoting chunks of some important work which has been produced before.

  Q142  Mr Key: That is very haphazard, is it not? Would it not be better to have a code of practice on searches or some such?

  Dr King: We are very much in active discussion on this at the moment, on how in the future we will be able to approach that. The electronic medium will give us new opportunities to do that. The ability to do this is not really there at the moment.

  Q143  Mr Key: With whom are you in active discussion?

  Dr King: Within the Institute of Physics Publishing and also with other learned society publishers through organisations such as Sally's.

  Mr Key: I wish you well, because I think it is very important.

  Q144  Dr Harris: On this question of misconduct, let us say that it has happened and been discovered, you are aware that there is a committee on publication ethics which has a series of sanctions which can be taken once there has been an investigation and a finding. Would you be happy if one of your journals settled for a correcting editorial initially and then followed that up with a partial retraction by a partial number of the authors with the main protagonist declaring innocence, without going to the further stage of saying you will not publish these authors again for a specified time, for example until they accept that they have done something wrong.

  Mr Richardson: Each case is different. We would look at the circumstances, if there were a committee of ethics we would their guidelines and if not we would be working with the authors and the editors of the journal to resolve the problem. It depends very much on the individual circumstances. I do not want to comment on that particular case, because I am not familiar enough with the details.

  Q145  Dr Harris: Do you subscribe to the COPE guidelines?

  Mr Richardson: We do, but these things vary from subject to subject. You are just talking about medicine; other subjects have completely different ways of working. Where there are guidelines, we work with them.

  Q146  Dr Harris: Do you think there is a worry that journals do not want to end up with egg on their face, so whilst they are very vigilant about policing it, they try to keep the damage limited.

  Mr Richardson: No, my experience is that journals and their editorial boards take it very seriously and do what they can to try to work with the guidelines and help develop them in many cases.

  Q147  Mr McWalter: I was interested in what you said about having material in your New Journal of Physics which is not textual and presumably needs to be read by macro-media or even a real player or whatever and you have mentioned Google and PubMed already. Clearly what can happen in these areas is that an awful lot of maintenance is required to allow that to be read by someone in five or ten years' time when Google or whatever is no longer the current mechanism for conducting a search. Even in the case of something like Dingbats, that particular font, if someone has used that and then somebody is reading it on a computer which does not have it, it can all start to look like gibberish. That is a huge burden on commercial publishers, they tell us, and they say that is one of the reasons why they charge higher prices. Are they just having us on, or would you need to increase your prices to be able to make electronic publications sustainably accessible to a public over the course of the next few decades?

  Mr Richardson: That is why a preservation system is necessary, in order to be able to store the material in a neutral format so that it is possible to move on when new technology emerges. We would certainly support the creation of an independent archive to fulfil that, otherwise you are unlikely to preserve the underlying data in a neutral format.

  Q148  Mr McWalter: That is a tough IT job, is it not, when you have a different architecture for the chips and so on?

  Mr Richardson: Absolutely. It is very difficult. It is very expensive and that is why it is bigger than any publisher can solve by themselves and you need a co-operative system of something like the British Library providing that archive rather than each publisher trying to solve these problems for themselves because they are big problems.

  Q149  Mr McWalter: Are they going to take the cost of it, take the pressure off you?

  Mr Richardson: It is a fallback. We are almost certainly going to continue to make the material available, but an independent archive is a fallback position. Nobody really knows how technology is going to change over 100 years.

  Q150  Mr McWalter: So that does mean that commercial publishers who claim it is a big cost to them are having us on.

  Mr Richardson: It is a big cost both to commercial publishers and the not-for-profit publishers.

  Q151  Mr McWalter: Except that in your case you are having the burden taken off you by the public sector, whereas the commercial sector is apparently trying to do the same thing all over again but charging an arm and a leg to its subscribers for that task to be done by them. Why should not Reed Elsevier or whoever also have this task done for them by the British Library?

  Mr Richardson: That is what I am suggesting, that there should be a multi-publisher archive which can be used by all publishers, whether they are commercial or not-for-profit.

  Mr McWalter: I think I might have got a recommendation out of that, but we shall see.

  Q152  Chairman: A last question on the research assessment exercise. I actually despise it and think it is really biased. How has it made a difference to your lives in terms of publishing in the journals? How has it turned authors around?

  Mr Richardson: It does make a difference in terms of submissions during the peak of the research assessment exercise. We are primarily an international publisher, so the 20% of material we get from the UK is smoothed in the other 80% we get from the rest of the world who also have research assessment exercises, but fortunately they do not all operate on the same timescale.

  Dr King: Ninety-four% of our papers actually come from authors abroad, so it is a small percentage which is affected. On the other hand I think that setting journals the challenge of driving the quality up is healthy for science. Whilst a reliance on the research assessment exercise and almost giving people marks for having published letters in Phys Rev Letters[1] is not healthy, but things which help drive the quality of journals up are very positive.

  Mrs Morris: I would echo what Julia says. The recognition of the importance of the markers of quality that publication can confer, if it is properly understood, is a healthy thing and is helpful in driving up quality in the journal field. When it is applied as a blunt instrument, it is not helpful and probably distorts people's publishing patterns.

  Q153  Dr Iddon: Nature rejects most of its papers. Does that not drive up the cost of the journals in that they have to arrange for peer review of all those papers they reject? As you drive up the quality, surely you drive up the cost of your journal.

  Mrs Morris: Yes you do, because it costs money to reject papers as well.

  Mr Richardson: It is the really top quality premier journals which have the biggest problems in terms of additional submissions. We certainly find with a lot of our journals that although we have heard of a three% average increase, many journals are having 20 to 30% increases in submissions a year because they are the premier journals in their field. Yes, it is a big problem.

  Chairman: May I thank the three of you for starting us off today. We are buzzing now. Thank you very much indeed for taking time and coming to help us in our inquiry. We look forward to adding all the comments you have made to our report. Thank you very much indeed.





1   Note by the Witness: Physical Review Letters, a highly cited physics journal published by the American Physical Society. Back


 
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Prepared 20 July 2004