SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHINGIN THE EUROPEANRESEARCH AREA

Conference, Brussels, 15-16 February 2007

ACCESS, DISSEMINATION AND PRESERVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Conference ProceedingsEUROPEANCOMMISSION

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SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHINGIN THE EUROPEANRESEARCH AREA

Conference, Brussels, 15-16 February 2007

ACCESS, DISSEMINATION AND PRESERVATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME ....................................................................................................................................... 6

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................... 8

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE RESEARCH COMMUNITy ........................................................................................... 9

ExPERIMENTS WITH NEW ARRANGEMENTS FOR ACCESS .........................................................................................11

TURNING DATA INTO kNOWLEDGE .......................................................................................................................... 13

QUALITy CONTROL .................................................................................................................................................... 14

E-INFRASTUCTURE AND LONG-TERM PRESERvATION ............................................................................................... 15

LEGAL ISSUES ............................................................................................................................................................. 16

TASkS FOR THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION ............................................................................................................... 17

Author: Jon Turneyjonturney@dsl.pipex.com

www.jonturney.dsl.pipex.com

CONFErENCE PrOgrAmmE THURSDAY 15th FEBRUARY

OPening SPeech

Janez Potočnik ..................................................................................................... eU commissioner for Science and Research

THE cURREnT SciEnTiFic pUBlicATion SYSTEm: oppoRTUniTiES AnD cHAllEngES

Research funding bodies’ policiesModerator:Dieter Imboden ............................................................................................................................Vice-President, eurohORcRalf Schimmer ...............................................................................................................................Max-Planck Digital LibraryJerry Sheehan .....................................................................Assistant Director for Policy Development, national institutes of healthRobert kiley .....................................................................................................................head of e-Stratgey, Wellcome Trust

Expectations from the research communityModerator:Jan velterop ......................................................................................................................Director of Open Access, SpringerMaria Cristina Pedicchio ............................................................................................ Professor of Algebra, University of TriesteRobert Aymar..................................................................................................................................Director general, ceRnMartin Hofmann ............................................................... Professor, Frauhofer ScAi (institute of Algorithms & Scientific computing)

A debate on the scientific publication market: trends, challenges and opportunitiesModerator:Astrid Wissenburg ..............................................................................................Director, economic & Social Research councilNick Fowler ...............................................................................................................Director of Strategy, Reed elsevier groupMathias Dewatripont ...................................................................................Professor of economics, Université libre de BruxellesMatthew Cockerill .........................................................................................................................Publisher, BioMed central

PArALLEL wOrShOPS

Scientific publication business models; access and dissemination strategiesAnne Bergman-Tahon ......................................................................................................... Federation of european PublishersGraham Taylor ................................................................................................................... Federation of european PublishersIan Russel ...........................................................chief executive Officer, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Robert Campbell ..................................................................................................................... President, Blackwell PublishingSusan Hezlet ...............................................................................................................Publisher, London Mathematical societyGuillaume Dervieux .............................................................................................Managing Director, Armand collin Publishingkaat van Wonterghem ................................................................................co-ordinator, Flemish councils of Research LibrariesMichael Nentwich ....................................................................................................................Austrian Academy of Science Mick Archer .......................................................................................................Virtual library portfolio manager, Astra ZenecaPaul Ayris .................................................................................................... network of Universities from the capitals of europeDavid Cameron .....................................................................european Bioinformatics institute - eiROforum views on Open Access

6 / CONFErENCE PrOgrAmmE

E-infrastructure and long-term preservationElizabeth Lyon ......................................................................................................... Director, UK Office for Library networkingJohn Wood .................................................................................. chairman european Strategy Forum on Research infrastructuresPeter Tindemans ......................................................................... chair Taskforce on Permanent Access for Koninklijke Bibliotheek Franck Laloë .......................................................................................Researcher, centre national de la Recherche ScientifiqueDavid Giaretta ................................................................................................Director of Development, Digital curation centreEileen Fenton ............................................................................................................................. executive Director of PorticoDonatella Castelli ........................................................................................................................... cnR-iSTi, DRiVeR project Saskia de vries ............................................................................................................................Amsterdam University Press

Scientific publication, quality assurance and research excellencePeter Burnhill ........................................................................................................... Director, edinburgh University Data LibraryJohn Enderby ................................................................................................University of Bristol (Research Assessment exercise)Jean-Claude Guédon .............................................................................................................Professor, University of Montreal Leo Waaijers ..................................................................................................................... Platformmanager icT and research David Robey .............................................................................................................Programme Director, Arts and humanitiesMark Patterson.................................................................................................. Director of Publishing, Public Library of ScienceDonald W. king ..................................................... Professor, Dept of information and Library Science, University of north carolinaFiona Bennett .....................................................................head, Rights and new Business Development, Oxford University PressPaola de Castro .............................................................................................................................. italian institute of health

copyright and digital rights managementJohn Wilbanks ............................................................................................................... executive Director, Science commonsJamie Watt ..........................................................................................................................................heriot Watt universityMathias Ulmer ........................................................................................ “Volltextsuche online” , eugen Ulmer Verlag publishing Christophe Geiger ...........................................................................................................................................Max PlanckGraham vickery .......................................Directorate for Science, Technology and industry, head information economy Unit, OecDWilma Mossink ......................................................copyright and publishing agreements expert, Legal adviser to SURF FoundationChristine Reid ........................................................................................................Technology and intellectual Property LawyerNeil Beagrie .............................................................................................................. JiSc/British Library Partnership Manager

FRiDAY 16th FEBRUARY

Reporting from the speakers and parallel sessionsModerator:Arnoud de kemp ....................................................................................................................................Founder of digilibri

Roundtable discussionModerator:Horst Soboll ..................................................................................................................... european Research Advisory Board Stevan Harnad ..............................................................................................................................University of SouthamptonAlex Williamson .................................................................................................................................British Medical JournalNorbert kroó ....................................................................................................Vice-President, hungarian Academy of ScienceRichard Boulderstone ...................................................................................................................Director eiS, British Library Michael Mabe.................................................................. international Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical PublishersSijbolt J. Noorda ...................................................................................................................european University AssociationMartin Blume ......................................................................................................editor-in-chief, The American Physical SocietyOve Poulsen ...........................................................................................................Rector, engineering college of engineering

cLOSing SPeech

viviane Reding ..........................................................................................eU commissioner for information Society and Media

CONFErENCE PrOgrAmmE / 7

Since that mythic moment, the scientific publication system has grown more elaborate. From the correspondence networks of medieval scholars, through the early transactions of organisations like the Royal Society in England, to the modern myriad of scholarly journals, it depended on the physical circulation of paper. Now that is being complemented, or even superseded, by digital publication. With the growth in use of the internet, bits and bytes travel more easily and cheaply, than ink on paper. This promises great advantages in ease of access to scientific results, but also new complications and even conflicts. It is easy to argue that the transition to a mainly digital system is inevitable, but working out the details raises much policy, financial and legal issues. This is a major change in the scientific ecosystem, with unpredictable consequences.

These changes were at the heart of the discussion at the conference on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area. The meeting, in fact, ranged well beyond publishing in Europe, scientific publishing is part of a global system. But European concerns were part of the core agenda. As Janez Potočnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research, emphasised in his opening speech, the Commission believes that the future of Europe depends on establishing a knowledge society. So the Commission naturally has a strong interest in the dissemination of knowledge, and the way it is going to be done in future. This conference brought together scientists and scholars, publishers, editors, librarians, archivists, computer scientists, research funders, representatives of learned societies and others with an interest in the circulation and use of research to share views on the changes now under way, and how to steer them. Commissioner Janez Potočnik opened the conference by stating that “change is inevitable...” and “now is the time to act and I hope we can do it in an inclusive way.”

Scientific discovery has always come in two parts; finding something out, and telling everyone else. As Archimedes

realised when he leapt from his bath shouting “Eureka”, what you have found does not become knowledge until it is shared.

inTRoDUcTion

inTRoDUcTion / �

nEw oppoRTUniTiES FoRTHE RESEARcH commUniTY

Much of the debate about digital publishing has centred on the way the web can widen access to academic

journals, potentially to anyone, anywhere with a computer terminal connected to the internet. In principle, as Michael Mabe of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers put it, this means that a single copy of a scientific paper might serve the whole planet. So calls for open access to the literature, free of institutional or financial constraints, can now readily be met, at least in technical terms. Such a move has strong supporters, who argue, with Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston, that “ensuring the outputs of research are freely available to all is the best way to maximise its utility”. The European Commission (EC), like many other research funders, is broadly sympathetic to this argument. And, in common with national governments, it believes that it contributes financially to publication three times over – through funding research projects, through paying salaries of academics who give their time to reviewing, and through library budgets. So it has a threefold entitlement to express a view about the matter, on top of its overall concern with the development and exploitation of research in Europe, as viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media, emphasised.

Many others are looking to the EC for a lead on open access, and recorded their support for the idea in a petition presented

credit. It records and preserves the accumulating body of findings , the knowledge base. And it gives researchers in different fields, technologists, and those outside the research community access to that knowledge.

These functions are the product of a complex division of labour which derives from a mosaic of publicly and privately funded institutions. Some contribute to this system unpaid, but usually as part of their salaried work - referees and journal editorial boards. Some journals are published by not-for-profit organizations such as learned societies, though they may return significant revenues which support those societies’ other work. And many are produced by commercial publishers, who benefit from the pro bono efforts of reviewers, but contribute copy-editing, design, layout, printing and more often these days electronic mark-up and distribution, in pursuit of a commercial return.

One difficulty in assessing the impact of changes in this system is that its present operation is complex and thus not always understood. One clear conclusion is that we need to know more about the “workflow” which supports the publishing process, especially as it is changing, and the roles of authors, editors and publishers may become increasingly blurred.

Interpretations of what we do know also vary. The major publishers argue that the current arrangements work well, and that they are in a good position to help the research community reap the benefits of digital innovations. They counsel caution in developing new publishing models

to the Commission just before the conference, which attracted over 20,000 signatures from individual researchers and organisations. However, the question of open access is only one of the issues raised by the ecosystem changes now beginning to take hold. Getting a grip on the other issues, means taking account of the whole range of functions which the modern scientific publishing system performs. More, it involves understanding new functions which may be enabled by the new technology. Digital techniques are changing much else about scientific practice aside from publication, so we have two complex systems, mutually embedded, each changing in ways whose outcomes are still uncertain.

As a number of speakers pointed out, the scientific publishing system does several things. It is the first line of quality control on research results. It is the lynchpin of the system of academic reward and

10 / nEw oppoRTUniTiES FoR THE RESEARcH commUniTY

1. Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific and technical publishing markets in Europe. Final Report. January 2006.

nEw oppoRTUniTiES FoRTHE RESEARcH commUniTY

before they have been tested and proven effective and sustainable.

There is naturally a fear that if research funders insist on open access this will cut publishers’ profit. Their response to this possibility is a series of arguments which add up to, “it’s not broke, so don’t try to fix it”. Nick Fowler, Director of Strategy for Elsevier spelled out how the company plays a part in a system which, in his view, already delivers access, quality, and preservation efficiently and cost-effectively – and is improving on all these counts.

Access, in particular, is already getting easier, he suggested. This is a benefit of major investments by publishers in e-technologies, putting current editions and back issues of many existing journals online and cutting licensing costs. Publishers like Elsevier, he stressed, are also happy to explore other new arrangements with demonstrable benefits, but are resistant to “one size fits all” recommendations. Embargo periods for open access, for example, need to take account of the different patterns of use of different journals, in different disciplines. Although discussions often propose a six month period as a reasonable spell for publishers to restrict access and earn a return, many papers attract as many downloads after six months are up as they do in the first half year after publications.

Nick Fowler finished with a plea for “fact-based” policy, echoing a Publishers’ Declaration issued to coincide with the conference. That document, endorsed by major publishers including Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, the British Medical Journal Group, Nature Publishing Group and the American Institute

of Physics, suggests that academic freedom includes authors being “free to choose where they publish in a healthy, undistorted free market”. It offers a particularly strong warning against open deposit of accepted manuscripts. This, the publishers suggest, has dangers because it would lead to loss of subscriptions, and so undermine the economics of journal publishing. This in turn, they declare, would jeopardise the whole current system of quality control: “Free availability of significant proportions of a journal’s content may result in its cancellation and therefore destroy the peer review system upon which researchers and society depend.”

This suggestion was greeted with some scepticism by libraries and the research community. Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at University College London, said he was “mystified” by the idea, and had never heard open access used as a reason for cancelling a journal.

However there are prospective surveys indicating that librarians would be inclined to cancel a subscription to a journal if all the content was on open access, even if there was a six month delay. And there was some support for this finding from the experience of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which had to curtail an open-access website in 2004, after six years of operation, because of subscription losses. In this case, though, many of the subscribers to the BMJ are individual doctors, so it serves a market of practitioners, which is not the case for many other journals.

What is clear is that the overall scientific publication system operates in what Mathias Dewatripont of the Université libre de Bruxelles called a “very unusual market”. Professor Dewatripont, one of the principal authors of the 2006 study for the Commission of the European scientific journals’ market, underlined the report’s findings that in some fields a few or even just a single publisher produce a very high percentage of the journals. This clearly is not an environment of perfect competition. More recently, moves to large-scale “bundled” subscriptions to scores or hundreds of titles may lock libraries into inflexible deals which make it hard for new providers to enter the market.

11

ExpERimEnTS wiTH NEw ArrANgEmENTS FOr ACCESS

It is clear that new business models are emerging, though whether they are universally applicable is uncertain. The

conference heard several times that there is no single strategy which will work for all in future, and that closely observed experiments are needed. So it is useful to review some of the models already in place or being promoted by various organisations trying to influence the future of academic publishing.

As is well known, there are new publishers who are by-passing print altogether, and offer a lower cost model for research dissemination than the traditional journal. Electronic only publication is not necessarily linked to open access, but often is in practice. The best known example of this model is BioMed Central (not to be confused with PubMed Central, although BioMed Central papers are available by that route.) Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central’s publisher, suggested that their history since they were founded in 2000 shows that electronic publication and open access is “an entirely feasible way of developing a commercial organisation”. BioMed Central has yet to break even, though it expects to do so in 2007. It now offers 160 open access journals, which have published 22,000 papers. Funding is through an article processing charge, usually around €1,000, and there are currently 1,000 submissions to BioMed Central journals a month.

The new open-access journals have made a strong impression in some fields. In malaria, for example, the BioMed Central journal Malaria Research now publishes more papers on the disease than all but one of the older journals which cover malaria research.

Again in the biomedical area, research funders have been active in developing ideas on access. The UK’s Wellcome Trust, for example, has a well-developed position on open access, which it has recently made a grant condition for all the biomedical researchers it supports. Its overall interest in publishing, as its head of

12 / ExpERimEnTS wiTH nEw ARRAngEmEnTS FoR AccESS

e-strategy Robert kiley explained, serves a range of purposes. The main motive is to improve the quality of research by maximising access, but the Trust is also looking to greater integration of the literature with underlying data, better tools for evaluating the effectiveness of its funding, and clear routes to long-term preservation: “future-proofing the record of medicine”.

The Trust requires electronic copies of any of its grant-holders’ research papers accepted by a peer-reviewed journal to be deposited with PubMed Central within six months of publication. If the publisher agrees to submit papers to the database in the right format, researchers can pay an open access fee from their grant (the “author pays” model), provided there are no restrictions on copying, distribution or use of the article, except for commercial use. The Trust will consider other ways of paying for open access, but emphasises that it is up to publishers to propose what these might be. Agreements have already been made with a large number of publishers, either for paid open access or to allow authors to self-archive, but there are some who have not yet signed up. Here, the position is uncompromising: “if the publisher doesn’t offer a product we can buy, we have to look for an alternative supplier”, Robert kiley warned.

It is too soon to tell how well researchers will adhere to the new regime, as it was only applied to all new papers in October 2006. There is money on offer to fund 100 per cent of papers being put on open access, though. The Trust estimates that this will apply to

4,000 papers a year at an annual cost of £6.6 million – just over one per cent of its current research expenditure. Four fifths of papers also cite another funder, though, so the total cost may be shared. The commitment to open access is gathering momentum in the Uk with eight biomedical research funders joining the new, Uk version of PubMed Central.

Elsewhere, the movement is picking up more slowly. In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) introduced a non-mandatory open-access policy in May 2005. But although investigators are “strongly encouraged” to submit to the PubMed Central archive, Jerry Sheehan of the National Library of Medicine reported that only around four per cent of eligible articles are being archived under the new policy so far, although more than ten per cent appear in PubMed Central by other routes. The NIH is working to make deposition easier, and is considering mandating open access.

The rather smaller community of particle physicists are further advanced with plans for full open access. The Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), for example, is an international, peer-reviewed, on-line only scientific journal, “a journal by scientists for scientists”. Again, the aim is reduced publication cost while maintaining rigourous peer review. Robert Aymar, Director-General of the European Organisation for Nuclear research (CERN), pointed out that the CERN convention can be read, retrospectively, as an open access manifesto, with its declaration that “the results of its experimental and

theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available”.

For high energy physicists, “or otherwise” has long included uploading preprints to subject repositories, but Director-General Aymar believed the time was ripe for full open access in particle physics. CERN and the main particle physics funding agencies are leaders in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). The final configuration of the consortium is not yet in place, but it is likely to include funding agencies, particle physics labs, author communities and libraries. The negotiations are complex but, as Director-General Aymar pointed out, not as complex as those around the massive collaborations which are put together to build detectors at CERN.

One concern common to new and old business models is that there are many dimensions of access. It does not just mean the conditions under which an internet surfer can retrieve a paper. Third world nations can access electronic journals, at least in theory, but what about their authors’ access to publication under an author pays model? And what about authors who have no institutional affiliation? Around half the authors who submit to the British Medical Journal group’s publications are unfunded, for example. Some open access models are taking this into account. The American Physical Society has a pair of open access journals, one of which is funded through author payments, but impecunious authors contributions are sponsored – and the editor does not know who pays their own way. In general,

ExpERimEnTS wiTH nEw ARRAngEmEnTS FoR AccESS / 13

“no journal would want to refuse to publish an article because an author can’t pay”, but that does not mean other authors will be happy to pay more to subsidise their fellow researchers.

The physics community has also given thought elsewhere to the interests of authors around the world, a concern raised repeatedly at the conference. The new consortium will produce journals which will consider submissions from anyone, whatever their affiliation. And there will be no charge to authors as costs will be covered by the consortium partners. The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics has gone further by setting up an open access archive to allow scientific work from any country to be posted free of charge. It accepts preprints, conference papers and pre-publication book chapters, along with scientific CVs, to help authors publicise their work and find out what else may be going on in their own country.

There are also linguistic barriers to access, which need to be taken into account. Putting a document online in English does not necessarily mean that it can be read by everyone in Europe, let alone in Asia, Africa or South America. By the same token, non-English language publications in Europe can reach more users through electronic publication, but may have a small subscription base from which to experiment with open access. Small publishers in general see risks in the digital transition, and small journals may prove vulnerable to the changes. It is essential to keep in mind the needs of social sciences and humanities, and of broader

linguistic considerations. Perhaps there is a need for a European research publication platform, which would improve integration of small journals and languages spoken or read by fewer people into the mainstream.

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TURning DATA inTo kNOwLEdgE

The first argument for widening access to academic research is that publicly funded research results should be freely accessible

to the public. This is more a point of principle, perhaps, as journal papers are not designed to be accessible (in the literary sense) to lay readers. But there may also be scientific benefits in prospect from the new modes of publication. They are not confined to easier access to existing results or making faster, more comprehensive literature researches available to more people, and across fields. There will also be payoffs from new ways of analysing the content of papers, and processing the results held in electronic repositories which, according to Jerry Sheehan, will “help scientists see connections between data they would not have been able to see by themselves”.

So there could be much more going on here than a change in “the way the minutes of science are recorded”. The dynamics of the scientific system as an interactive discussion which relies on distributed intelligence may be transformed. New techniques are being developed for extracting meaning from the wealth of data, new and old.

Part of the drive to develop these new methods comes from the hope for building up a new systems biology, to exploit the large amounts of data now accumulating about gene activity, protein manufacture, and other biochemical markers, and how all of these vary from organ to organ and over time. But these new “data-mining” techniques will not be confined to the data-rich life sciences. They have many applications in the social sciences, and in the more text-based humanities, for example, where the digitised corpus can be analysed in ways scholars whose work is confined to printed volumes are not able to explore.

TURning DATA inTo KnowlEDgE / 15

For some, such as Martin Hofmann of the Frauhofer Institute of Algorithms and Scientific Computing, these changes herald a new paradigm for science and science communication. Addressing questions about the operation of complex systems and improving their simulation, demands multiple integration of biological, chemical and medical information. And it requires sophisticated computer techniques to help researchers distinguish signal from noise. It is all but impossible to keep pace with new information about just a handful of genes, proteins, and the functions they are involved in. When 30,000 genes can be tracked at once, new analytical methods are essential.

In biology, he stressed, the task includes keeping track of words in papers as well as data. “The more complex the subject is, the more likely you will find it adequately described only in unstructured text, in natural language”. So there is an effort to develop systems which can connect entities in text with entities in databases. And these will also need to be able to handle images, such as those used to depict chemical structures. One ultimate goal is “automatically generated knowledge layers” which will be overlaid on the electronic text and

offer a quick route to connecting a paper with other relevant material – whether it is genes, proteins, metabolic markers, or biochemical pathways. Exactly how this will ultimately mine information to generate new knowledge awaits future demonstration, but the first steps are being made.

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QUAliTY conTRol

The controversial suggestion from one large set of publishers that open electronic access could jeopardise the peer review system

through loss of subscriptions was one focus for the discussion of quality control. As Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central suggested, one can argue that existing open access electronic journals “demonstrate that the peer review system does not depend on subscription barriers”. But that may not necessarily mean that all fields, or all journals would replicate BioMed Central’s experience if they emulated their publishing model. In any case, the peer review system is under increasing pressure for other reasons, not least the increasing volume of papers being sent for review. One (unnamed) publisher was said to manage this by checking citation counts of an author’s previous work, and only sending out for review papers by researchers who boasted a pre-set number of citations. This is clearly a recipe for a self-perpetuating regime.

At the same time, the new digital publishing regime raises a number of other issues related to quality control. If there is self-archiving or uploading of papers, version control can be an issue and certifying a peer-reviewed, edited text as the definitive version of a paper has to be arranged with extra care. There may be rewards here for publishers from hybrid models. In astronomy, for example, several of the principal journals allow preprints of papers to be circulated electronically. But their use drops off after publication in the journal. There is some evidence that articles which appeared as preprints score higher numbers of downloads than those which did not. Again, there is no guarantee this would be replicated in other fields, but it seems an encouraging example of co-existence.

Other quantitative measures which are used as indexes of quality also depend on the peer review system. Some felt they had lost relevance because of scientists’ reliance on more informal publication. In a small field like particle physics, for example, reputation rests on readers’ assessment of the quality of preprints, which authors know will be mercilessly criticised. More broadly, journal impact factors were widely held to be unsatisfactory as an indicator of the worth of an individual author’s work, and the search is on for more refined measures, perhaps incorporating other usage factors. But publication-based measures need to be used with caution by promotion or appointment committees: “hiring a colleague is different from making a publishing decision”.

QUAliTY conTRol / 17

E-inFRASTUcTURE ANd long-TERm pRESERvATion

If this new way of doing science is to be developed it will depend on a highly efficient system of linking research papers to the data

they draw on, and to larger databanks. This requires development of new techniques for representing what it contains, as just discussed. But just as important are steps to ensure that the data is accessible, and properly maintained in a way which potential users can easily exploit.Storage, preservation and E-infrastructure are therefore becoming key issues. The switch to electronic repositories is happening as volumes of data are growing more rapidly than ever before – not surprisingly as the two are connected. This arises partly because of new, high throughput technologies which generate mountains of data, perhaps especially in the biomedical sciences but also in other disciplines. The vast majority of supplementary data logged in biomedical work has to be accessed separately from the journal papers it supports, if it is accessible at all. Thousands of new data sets are being made available every day. But institutions may only look after data generated by workers who remain with them – when people move there are often problems in apportioning responsibility for future preservation, and data can be lost.

18 / E-inFRASTUcTURE AnD long-TERm pRESERvATion

that international organisations have a role in supporting the new information infrastructure. They need to take a long view. As viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media emphasised, digital information can be highly unstable compared to paper, let alone the clay tablets to which civilisations used to entrust their most precious records. The rapid turnover of digital platforms, media and standards, and the ambition to ensure long-term access to ever-growing volumes of material, underlines the dictum that preservation is a process, not a one-time event.

Digital preservation will be important for many organisations, but the potential rewards in science are especially attractive. They will require new software tools, both for overlaying metadata on the electronic version of a published paper, and for linking the paper with databases containing supplementary information.

Then there is digitisation of older material, archiving of theses, electronic maps, websites, and a set of new “Web 2” tools like blogs and wikis, which may also merit archiving. And there are increasing volumes of data bound up in other digital objects such as audio or video files.

This aspect of the broad transformation of the publication system now under way demands responses at many levels. National research libraries, for example, are likely to remain responsible for the later stages of preservation, but will not track every blog and e-forum. They are already concerned about the costs of dealing with increasing volumes of print and electronic storage, and about standards. Electronic publication and self-archiving can also lead to a proliferation of versions of scientific papers, which makes quality control harder to guarantee. If one copy of a paper can serve the entire planet, which copy should it be?

Add in questions like how to handle data objects of many different kinds, how to find ways of integrating and annotating and certifying databases, and how to train researchers in the relevant techniques, and a formidable agenda emerges. The current picture is still of raising awareness, designing testbeds for experiments, and pondering how it will all be paid for. But it is clear

E-inFRASTUcTURE AnD long-TERm pRESERvATion / 1�

lEgAl iSSUES

Another area where further thought, and clearer policies, may be required is the legal framework for publication.

Open access publishing can adopt existing creative commons licensing arrangements. But complications quickly arise. As intellectual property lawyer Christine Reid asked, what happens to open access arrangements for a piece of research which might be part-funded by the Wellcome Trust, part by industry, and part by a government department, all with different interests.

At the same time, publishers who own rights to work which is not on open access, but is nevertheless widely available electronically, worry about pirate copying and plagiarism. But using Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to control copying can be a blunt instrument. Copyright normally includes the right to make copies – for quotation or fair research use, for example. According to Christophe Geiger of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, “a technical blockage itself is blind and cannot discern if a user is about to make a legal or an illegal copy”. He was fearful of a tendency toward the “privatisation” of copyright by technical means.

TASkS FOr ThEEURopEAn commiSSion

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Everyone agrees that a healthy scientific publishing system is essential. And policy-makers are realising that it needs to be

treated as a system whose parts interact. As Commissioner viviane Reding put it at the close of the conference, we need to recognise “a continuum in scientific information space from data to publications”. That suggests the Commission will want to act in ways which influence the system at a number of different levels.

Most obviously, it will want to specify conditions for publication of results from its own research, and there is already an intention from the European Research Council (ERC) to mandate those who get money from the ERC funded part of the Seventh Framework Programme (“Ideas”) to use an open access repository within six to twelve months of any paper’s publication. But as Commissioner Reding emphasised, the Commission is a policy-maker as well as a research funder. “We are stakeholders, and we have a duty to show the way”, she said. So it is also likely to take a close interest, and possibly support a range of experiments in different forms of publication, particularly with a view to establishing where the money goes. There are real costs all along the spectrum from informal communication to formal scientific communication, and it is often difficult to work out what they are and who pays them. But it is clear that there are particular costs at the transition to peer-reviewed publication where, as Martin Blume of the American Physical Society stressed, it costs as much to reject as to accept an article.

It also matters how the broader context for science publishing is understood. In the closing round table Ove Poulsen, Rector of the Engineering College of Aarhus emphasised that what matters is the strategic importance of science and research in Europe, not publishing. So the solutions to problems posed by the digital switch need to satisfy not just researchers and publishers, but also those who fund science, who want their investment accounted for: “we scientists are spending money, not making money”.

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Other important roles for the EC will be connected with regulation of databases and harmonisation of standards and legal frameworks for copyright and intellectual property. Norbert kroó, vice-President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences underlined the importance of encouraging European research organisations to work together. And there will be a continued effort to establish the infrastructure, both for open access and for data preservation. Data repositories may need to be considered an EU resource, and funded separately. The effort to understand the system better goes hand in hand with building the capacity to renew and maintain it. And it has to reconcile the interests whose views were expressed forcefully at this meeting - the public interest in access to and exploitation of results, the researchers’ interest in making their findings available to their peers and to other users,

established publishers’ interest in modifying the system in ways which allow them to stay in business, and new publishers’ eagerness to explore novel modes of publication and distribution. Universities and national libraries are also watching warily to see how the changes to the system develop. There is still a need to increase awareness of the issues, though. Sijbolt Noorda of the European University Association believed that many universities are still preoccupied with increasing publication impacts and cutting prices. “The majority are still largely unaware of what’s at stake and what could be done”, he felt.

So there is still an educational task in prospect, as well as a need for more efforts to spread best practice. But overall the conference also underlined the complexity of the overarching problem. It was defined at the close by Reding in

words which echoed the problem posed by Commissioner Potočnik in the opening session: “the key question in all this seems to be how to combine a rapid and wide dissemination of validated results with a fair remuneration for those who make the system work”.

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European Commission

EUR 244 — Scientific publications – Conference proceedings

Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities

2006 — 20 pp. — 21.0 x 29.7 cm

ISBN 978-92-79-05476-1

KI-77-07-244-E

N-C