After recapping our day in Oxford, Anthony mentioned the following four points for Value Added Journals:
Investment
Organization
Sustainability - Having everything in one big repository has not worked very well. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS), and Portico. e-Depot, was created by the National Library of the Netherlands, also known as the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, or the KB. It seems as though everyone is in a hurry to save things that are already available in print. As multimedia items such as video come into play, that becomes tricky since the machine needed to play it may be obsolete.
Selection - Librarians select but trade journals do as well.
This lead to the question of what is a book? These items are not books but have the same function as one. They add the value of production, branding and selection. We also spoke about the lack of open source textbooks. From a development standpoint, they are terribly expensive due to the amount of editorial content. Perhaps it’s something that can work if they follow a non-profit model and take advantage of the functionality of the web, but it has not be attempted as of yet. We also briefly mentioned the rise of gray literature with Open Access Journals.
Graham Bell, the Chief Data Architect at Editeur, a standards organization, spoke about the behind the scenes approach to trade books and e-books. He explained the low cost of ISBNs and how each country and region has their own process of obtaining and applying for them. He also covered, from his company’s standpoint, why it is necessary to have a different number for each product as well as each format. Ruth Jones spoke a few days before about why she thinks the ISBN system is antiquated so it was interesting to hear a different point of view. It’s not that there is not a standard in the industry but that there are many of them!
Graham also went on to poll the class on our use of e-books and determined that we are ahead of the curve since a large number of us do most of their reading on e-readers such as the Nook and Kindle. More than 3 times the number is Americans are heavy users as compared to UK readers.
One thing he mentioned was the financial competition within organizations. E-books are considered big users of money, since they take some to develop, while print are the money makers. Those in print divisions are unhappy with money going towards e-literature since it has yet to show a return.
Throughout Graham’s entire presentation, the one thing that surprised me, and most of my classmates, was the fact that DRM has not been applied to music, especially that offered by the Apples iTunes store for the past 3-4 years. These days, instead of being about Digital Rights Management, it's more about the enforcement. For example, the publishing industry is not worried about one user sharing their ebook with a friend. However, if that friend sells them in mass, with your watermark embedded in the book, then you have a problem. Large scale exploitation will not be tolerated. While making an ebook is not necessarily difficult, if the approach is lacking either content, structure or appearance, part of the triangle will fail. The last piece is metadata. Because if no one can find your book, it doesn’t matter if the other 2 pieces are stellar.
Rhodri Jackson, the Senior Publisher of Law Journals and Oxford Open at Oxford University Press, spoke about some of the issues mentioned at the Conference last week, namely The Cost of Knowledge Protest against Elsevier and the Finch Report. He also mentioned some of the competitors of OUP’s Open Access project such as PLoS ONE and SOAP.
Most of the information he offered had been covered during our visit to Oxford and the conference but it was still nice to hear the perspective of someone in the industry.The one thing he did mention was what is the role of librarians in the OA model? As a whole, librarians have been quiet. The questions of how do libraries pay for OA content was asked. Is it through membership, institutional funds?
After lunch, we headed to SAGE Publishing to meet Martha Sedgwick, Senior Manager of Online Products, and Alicia Warren, Project Manager, to discuss their innovations in Publishing. I was surprised when Martha stated that most people find their products via Google Search. While it’s possible to subscribe and search for full text directly via one of their platforms, 60-70% of their users find the product via free web search. With that high of a number, perhaps it makes sense not to spend the money creating a dedicated program. They spend money instead on metadata and searchability to appear at the top of search programs. I couldn't help but get the feeling that they want to be known as the biggest. They compared themselves to Bloomsbury and OUP in a we’re bigger and better than they are. It was a turnoff.
Their main focus seems to be Innovation by spending R&D budget and investing in new data sets. They have expanded their online products team from 4-13 in the past year and created new product streams such as print digitization, OA journals (social science based) and realizing that data has a value. They use Persona Cards for market research. Different characters have stats such as age, user group. Sage also runs a program to track users usage on the computer for one hour. How do people use their program, how long, what do they do if they’re frustrated, etc are all tracked. They also spend time working with the National Institute of the Blind on accessibility. Improving response times, workflow and archives for those with disabilities is important. They also use DOI and linked data to relate articles and keywords which are sharpened the more you search on their site.
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