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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120 - 139)

MONDAY 8 MARCH 2004

DR JULIA KING, MRS SALLY MORRIS AND MR MARTIN RICHARDSON

  Q120  Mr Key: Would you say that bundling in the not-for-profit sector has been a success?

  Mrs Morris: It is beginning to be. It is early days because it started much later in the not-for-profit sector because they had to persuade 20 or 50 publishers to agree with each other, which is not easy. It took longer to get off the ground, but now that it is, it is beginning to succeed.

  Mr Richardson: We are certainly finding that it is a very effective way of achieving greater economy of scale. We do in fact give the pricing decision to each of the societies for which we are publishing, so there is certainly no collusion or collaboration there.

  Q121  Mr Key: Do you not think that the commercial sector and now the not-for-profit sector are simply making life tougher for the libraries?

  Mr Richardson: Not at all, we are offering greater choice, greater economy of scale for libraries to be able to choose to take the material they need for their patrons.

  Q122  Mr Key: Is there any evidence of that?

  Mr Richardson: Yes, there are increasing amounts of usage coming from the journals which are participating in these schemes and lower cost per usage across the board. There is evidence.

  Mrs Morris: In no case is this the only way to buy the journals libraries want; if they only want to buy individual journals they can still buy them.

  Q123  Geraldine Smith: What measures are you taking to ensure the preservation of a digital archive?

  Mrs Morris: Publishers are working very closely with the British Library in this country. As I am sure you know, there is now provision for regulations to require legal deposit of electronic journals, though those have not actually been drawn up yet. We are working very closely with the British Library to ensure that experimental projects start now, so that by the time regulations can be drawn up for the deposit of electronic journals we have all learned what the problems are. Publishers have worked very closely with the British Library in the past few years on voluntary deposit of off-line publications to ensure that when legislation came up we knew what the problems were and we had discovered how it might work. A great many publishers are looking to the British Library as being the primary source of long-term preservation of electronic material, want to work very closely with them, want to be sure that they have the funds to do it, which is going to be a big question mark.

  Q124  Geraldine Smith: What about digitising back numbers? How far back do you go?

  Mrs Morris: Many societies have gone right back to the beginning. Either they have funded it themselves, in which case they are having to sell it to recover their investment. Some of them have had grants, some of them are doing it through an organisation called JStor, which you heard about last week. PubMed Central is also funding some digitisation of journals in their database. Various bodies are getting involved in digitising back runs of important journals and it is costing money, but it is very well worth while. The fact that it is being done is making a lot more content much more available.

  Q125  Geraldine Smith: How much has this increased the publishing costs of your journals?

  Mrs Morris: The digitisation of archives in particular?

  Q126  Geraldine Smith: Yes.

  Mrs Morris: I would need to ask specific publishers to answer that.

  Mr Richardson: We are only just at the beginning of a programme, so I do not have any specific details. Most of it is a one-off cost and there is obviously an ongoing cost in hosting the additional material, but it is largely a one-off cost in achieving the digitisation.

  Dr King: We have just recently, in 2002, made our entire archive back to 1874 available in digital form, which has been hugely successful and very much appreciated by the community. May I reinforce the point Sally made about the British Library? The New Journal of Physics is an electronic-only publication and it allows authors to use various multi-media and video clips and things which they obviously cannot use in the conventional journal. It was only last year that we persuaded the British Library and the German Deposit Library to accept NJP in its electronic form for archiving. It is absolutely crucial for the developments in electronic publishing which are going on that deposit libraries are funded to be able to maintain electronic archives. It is absolutely key. You cannot print the New Journal of Physics because you cannot use the three-dimensional images and the video, some of the things which are really crucial to explaining some of the very complex concepts in the papers. Some of the benefits of electronic publishing will not be captured for the future unless the British Library is able to invest in doing that.

  Mr Richardson: I would support that as well. Having a good digital archive for on-line journals would be the biggest thing which could help move the transition away from print. The other thing would be the VAT question, where the differential rate of charging VAT on on-line journals and not on print journals is really a big barrier to libraries moving away from print. Those would be two things which would encourage a move to on-line-only publication with savings for both publishers and their library customers.

  Q127  Geraldine Smith: How secure do you think the digital record is? How reliable will it be over a number of years?

  Mr Richardson: We certainly go to great lengths to ensure that it is secure. We have been publishing journals for 150 years in print and we are certainly very keen to make sure that our on-line journals are available for at least that long into the future. We go to a great deal of trouble to make sure we do preserve the data ready for when there is an archive which can actually take an archival copy of the material.

  Mrs Morris: One of the crucial things is that it is preserved in more than one place, so that if a disaster should befall the British Library or anywhere else, that is not the only electronic copy; that is a vital aspect to electronic preservation.

  Q128  Geraldine Smith: How would you answer some claims that you are keeping your prices down by under-investing in new technologies, particularly in secondary publishing, leaving the development of new technologies to the big commercial publishers?

  Mr Richardson: We are certainly investing a substantial amount in new technology to help our on-line publications. The other way is that by learned societies and not-for-profit publishers collaborating with each other we are able to achieve greater economies of scale, for example by sharing technology providers, so the investment is shared across many publishers rather than being taken by a single proprietary publisher who might be developing their own system.

  Q129  Geraldine Smith: Do you actually take advantage of the new technologies developed by commercial publishers?

  Mr Richardson: We are taking advantage of similar technologies but because not-for-profit publishers are generally smaller, we are working together, collaborating on things like technical standards and sharing the systems from single vendors. For example, HighWire Press work for more than 200 different publishers so are able to achieve an economy of scale and therefore compete effectively with commercial publishers.

  Dr King: Smaller publishers can often move quite a lot faster. Some of the things the learned society publishers and smaller publishers have done have driven the larger publishers to move forward faster in the electronic medium. The Institute of Physics was the first publisher to get all of its journal available on line long before some of the larger commercial publishers did. Sometimes you see the smaller, more agile publishers driving innovation, even though they may not have the same sorts of funds to spend as some of our larger colleagues.

  Mrs Morris: You mentioned secondary publishing too and a lot of that emanates from not-for-profit publishers, from learned societies and other not-for-profit publishers. Many of them have become specialists in very high quality secondary publishing and are market leaders in that.

  Q130  Geraldine Smith: Are your journals accessible via ScienceDirect and other such services provided by commercial publishers?

  Dr King: We have some agreements in place.

  Mr Richardson: We participate in the CrossRef system which almost all the commercial publishers are using to allow linking between publishers, material from different journals and also participating in the major search engines like Google and PubMed which are the main discovery tools which researchers use to find information.

  Q131  Geraldine Smith: What plans do you have to switch entirely to e-publication? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?

  Mr Richardson: I already mentioned the two main barriers preventing us doing that, namely the archive and the VAT question. We are ready to move when those two barriers are removed.

  Mrs Morris: It would save some money, not a huge amount of money, but it certainly would save some money if publishers did not have to produce print any more.

  Dr King: The last thing we want is a long tail of a small number of print copies and most people taking it electronically. That is the worst kind of scenario for us because that does not get us the economies of one or the other.

  Q132  Geraldine Smith: What are you doing to ensure that amateur and unsalaried researchers have good access to scientific journals in a digital age?

  Mr Richardson: We have a wide range of different licensing schemes. We are working through consortia and our material is also available from the British Library and anybody is free to walk into any of our subscribing libraries and use material without extra charge. We provide a very wide range of facilities and also document delivery. There are many opportunities for individual researchers to obtain our material.

  Dr King: We also provide everything free on-line for 30 days immediately after it is published and we have found that very popular. If anything, it has also encouraged people to subscribe to the journal, though that was not the intent of doing it, the intent was as a learned society to make sure material was available to people.

  Mrs Morris: We have also found that of the publishers who make their immediate back files freely available after a fairly short period, that is by far the most common amongst small learned society publishers. Quite a lot of those do that.

  Q133  Mr Key: If the OUP had been publishers of the Lancet would you have published Dr Wakefield's 1998 MMR article?

  Mr Richardson: There is always going to be the occasional article which slips through the net, but generally the peer review system is pretty good at picking up quite a lot of fraud and cutting things off before they get through to publication. We certainly have the most rigorous peer review system in all of our publications.

  Q134  Mr Key: Either it is most rigorous or you are content for them to slip through the net.

  Mr Richardson: It is most rigorous but there will always be the occasional one which slips through the net.

  Q135  Mr Key: Why?

  Mr Richardson: No system is perfect. Peer review relies on the experts; we are actually taking the view of experts in each area.

  Q136  Mr Key: Would you not have asked the author whether there was a conflict of interests?

  Mr Richardson: We did not publish that article.

  Mrs Morris: The Lancet did ask him and he said there was not.

  Q137  Mr Key: How do you police these conflicts of interest then?

  Mr Richardson: We have policies for authors to be able to declare any conflicts of interest and certify that there are no problems. So we have policies in place and we have the peer review system to back that up, where we are asking other experts to give their opinion on the material.

  Q138  Mr Key: Can you repeat what those policies are?

  Mr Richardson: It depends on the particular subject area we are talking about, but we certainly have policies in our medical journals for people to declare conflicts of interests at the time of submission. The second point was that the peer review system is there to back that up in terms of review of the material which is submitted. The policies vary a lot from subject to subject. The criterion in history, will be quite different from the criterion in medicine. The policies reflect the subject area in which we are publishing.

  Q139  Dr Iddon: Do you ask your authors to say where the money comes from to support the research anywhere in the paper?

  Mr Richardson: The policy varies from subject to subject. In some subject areas there is really very little research funding; in medicine for example we would ask for that. It very much depends on the subject area you are talking about.


 
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