Scholarly Communication in Science and Engineering Research in Higher Education

Citation

Meadows, J. (2004), "Scholarly Communication in Science and Engineering Research in Higher Education", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 60 No. 6, pp. 699-700. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410410568197

The problems of scholarly communication have been a matter of interest for many years now, but the growth and diversification of electronic facilities have emphasised the need for new thinking. This publication brings together contributions on the topic from a dozen authors, mostly American librarians. The editor has divided their papers into four groups – scholarly publishing; scholarly communication; digital archive and retrieval; bibliometric analysis of citation data – so the coverage is fairly broad. The material dates from two years back, so things have sometimes moved on a little. For example, publishers have been readier to give permission for self‐archiving than was generally predicted in 2002. However, in the main, the matters raised here are still relevant.

The underlying theme of several papers is what universities can do, and are doing, to satisfy the needs of their clients. One starting point is the on‐going problem of library subscriptions to journals. Roth's contribution notes that the American delight in page charges seems to have abated (just at the time when the question of upfront charges for electronic journals has come under discussion). This means that comparisons in terms of cost per page now favour society publishers over commercial publishers even more strongly than they did before. Indeed, society journals are not only relatively cheaper, but they often have higher impact factors. Roth provides an interesting comparison of dollar/guilder conversion rates with journal subscription prices over the past 30 years. The subscriptions have consistently gone up when the rate was bad for the publisher, but have not gone down when it was bad for the purchaser.

Another paper, by Soehner, examines how, in practice, a university can act as a depository for electronic papers. As she shows, there are ways of solving one of the problems – making the existence of papers in the depository known to a wider audience. However, another problem will be less easy to solve. It is likely to be some time before this alternative way of publishing can match the prestige of established journals. Hughes surveys what publishers are doing about electronic archiving. She observes that a mixture of local (at the institution) and central (at the publishers) archiving seems to be the most popular suggestion, though authors would prefer a third party (such as a national depository) to be involved. She looks at the problems of storage, but, unfortunately, does not explore the cost aspect.

The question of how librarians can help their clients’ use of electronic facilities comes up in a number of the papers. One down‐to‐earth suggestion is to make sure that clients understand the limitations of online searching. At present, many users suppose their results to be better and more complete than they actually are. Another suggestion is that librarians can help readers and authors over copyright uncertainties. The problem with this is that institutions are already establishing advisors, who may or may not be librarians, to cover copyright along with other intellectual property issues. The needs of clients as authors are mentioned in a number of the papers. One discussion looks at the drawbacks of citing practices in electronic documents, giving examples of the difficulties involved ‐ such as the existence of multiple URLs for the same material.

The authors are linked back to the publishers via the refereeing system. This is examined in two of the papers. The first, by Douglas, looks at the publication of conference proceedings. Papers presented at conferences are generally expected to be more lightly refereed than contributions to journals. Yet there is an increasing trend towards publishing conference proceedings in special issues of journals. As the author points out, this can cost up to $1,500 per paper, whereas quick publication online of a lightly‐refereed paper can be done for as little as $100 per paper. The other paper, by Ginsparg, also looks at different levels of refereeing, in this case based on his experience with the arXiv preprint distribution system. He makes the interesting suggestion that electronic distribution permits the introduction of a two‐tier approach to refereeing. At the first level, a basic examination, possibly automated, determines whether the paper should be mounted online. Subsequently, depending on reactions to the paper, it can be subjected to a more thorough refereeing, so becoming the equivalent of a paper in a standard journal.

The contents of this volume are something of a mixed bag (as with many Haworth publications, the material is appearing simultaneously as an issue of a journal – in this case, Science & Technology Libraries). The plus side of this is that most people interested in scholarly publishing should find an insight, or a set of data, that is new to them somewhere within it.