NASIG Newsletter

VISION SESSION

What’s a Serial When You’re Running on Internet Time?

T. Scott Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama-Birmingham
Reported by Gaele Gillespie 

From his perspective as a health science library director, a journal editor, and a member of a scholarly communications committee that is charting the future of the Medical Library Association, Scott Plutchak thinks the choices librarians make now for the utility and viability of serials will have as great an impact as when the first serial, The Philosophical Transactions, was published in London in 1665.  The current times, he feels, are equally as momentous for serials due to changing formats, open access, institutional repositories, and preservation. 

ARL’s definition of a serial is “a publication issued in successive parts, usually at regular intervals, and as a rule, intended to be continued indefinitely.  Serials include periodicals, newspapers, annual reports, yearbooks, etc., memoirs, proceedings, and transactions of societies.”  It’s a definition which is rooted in the physicality of its design and defined as something that can be counted.  How will that survive in the future of such fuzzy boundaries, where we have to differentiate between an e-journal, an e-book, a database?  Definitions are useful, but they can also hold us back and keep us from thinking creatively.  The functions of a serial will still need to happen, and our job is to figure out how to implement those functions in our libraries. 

Any new technology has a definite life cycle.  Many older ones do not disappear; they find a new niche.  The newest technology builds on the older one; there is an innovative stage, then it stabilizes, and things can be done with it that were not possible with the old technology.  This is what will happen with e-journal technology.  Print, the older technology, is not going away.  E-journal technology is currently in its early stages.   

Even though researchers want to read journal articles, not whole journals, e-journal literature has lots of competition:  other e-resources, such as rich databanks, grey literature, blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.  As librarians, we must keep our focus wide and be aware of these new resources and how one is replacing another.  Who is going to organize all these sources of information and get users to them? 

In this electronic environment, the journal article is more participatory, interactive, there’s more linked data, and it is less central to its journal as a whole.  However, it is also easier to change data in the e-journal articles and never track the change in the print version.  What happens to the scientific record when it’s so easy to change?  When there are two articles, both with the same title, the same author, and both are indexed, which one is the “real” one?  There is a NISO Working Group wrestling with identifying and defining versions of journal articles. 

From his perspective as a small society publisher of an open access journal, Mr. Plutchak says he often wonders what “open access” will mean in the future.  Most publishers and authors want to get information out as widely and as quickly as possible.  Librarians want this, too, because our users demand increased access at greater speed.  Therefore, the current adversarial position of librarians and publishers is unfortunate.  We used to talk to each other about our shared interests.  By definition, open access eliminates subscription barriers as much as possible.  Revenue based on a distribution stream made sense in the print world, but not in the electronic world.  From the publisher’s perspective, it is still all about the money.  It still costs to produce an e-journal, and there is not much new revenue to count on, plus library budgets are not increasing. Librarians are continually weighing what things need to continue to be done and what things do not.  From his perspective, money should be taken from library budgets to do the following:

 1. Market institutional repositories.  Get the faculty to submit articles to the repository rather than to publishers who keep the copyright and sell the scholarship back to libraries through subscriptions for which libraries pay quite a lot of money.  Then librarians need to gather and organize knowledge within their institutions and make it available to the rest of the world.  This would move scholarship forward.

 2. Preservation. In the print model, publishers published journals and assumed libraries would store all the journals they subscribed to and the publishers would not need to do anything more after selling and shipping the journals to libraries.  In the electronic model, the scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core journals in electronic format is far beyond what any one library can support.  So   librarians think publishers should maintain the electronic archive and provide for perpetual access as part of licensing terms.   We are in danger of losing a generation of scholarly literature, so how is the record going to be reconstructed?  How will librarians ensure that journal articles remain stable and can be found and used by future scholars?  Two initiatives arising out of partnerships between academic institutions and not-for-profit entities that offer permanent archiving of electronic journals are: 1) LOCKSS, Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (www.lockss.org), initiated by Stanford University Libraries, is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own local copy of authorized content they purchase;   2) PORTICO (www.portico.org), a collaborative initiative based on successful aspects of programs like JSTOR and Project Muse, is a new engagement between publishers and libraries that balances their needs and establishes the necessary funding to provide a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals. 

The job of librarians is not to build better libraries.  It is about cultivating particular skills and talents to help our communities manage knowledge.  How are we going to do this? The only way we can do this is to stop doing the things that are no longer relevant so that we can concentrate on the more relevant things, such as: 

1. Relationships between librarians and publishers are the key.  We need to find new ways to assess needs and new ways to fund them.  We need to get out of our libraries and meet with faculty in their world and find out how they are doing research and what they are using to do that research.  These should be informal, one-on-one meetings.  It is not just public service librarians who need to get out and do this, but all librarians. 

2. We need to be able to understand the economics of scholarly communication and publishing.  Publishers must get a better understanding of universities and how different they are.

3. We need to give more attention to cataloging electronic resources, and that cataloging should not be done for our benefit as catalogers or librarians, but to benefit our users.  We need to be part of developing better tools to make electronic resources available to our users.

4. We must give up trying to be perfect about everything we do.

5. We must be bold and experiment.  The world of electronic technology is ambiguous and imprecise, so we cannot try to make it be precise.  We need to be clear about our objectives and be willing to evaluate and try new or different approaches.  If something we try does not work, so what?  We should just intelligently reconsider it and try a new tack.  We need to cultivate smart, creative people who are willing to take risks and create the future.

6. Journal articles will become shorter, more like an abstract, and will link to the actual data, rather than being “the end” in themselves.  There needs to be improved or reformed, simplified peer review that is separate from the journal article.  For example, in the American Philosophical Society peer review process, the article is written, the society reviews it, approves it, gives it the stamp of a professional society, then sends the article back to the author.  The author puts it in a repository and makes it available worldwide.   

We are working in a time full of challenges and opportunities, and what a fabulous time it is!  The authors and scientists of 1665 would envy us!