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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