Beyond Books: What STM & Social Science publishing should learn from each other

Thu, 22nd Apr 2010

London Marriott Hotel/Kensington

Event Presentations

Videos provided by River-Valley Technologies - an STM member.

Research and information habits in the socials sciences and humanities: findings from the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey
Laura Brown (presented by Nancy Maron)
Managing Director, Ithaka, S+R
Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Are humanists and social scientists headed to the same essentially digital future for research sources, and if so, at what rate? Ithaka S+R’s most recent faculty survey provides an excellent source for understanding disciplinary practices, attitudes, and needs and how they have changed over the last decade. This talk will examine disciplinary perceptions on key issues for publishers such as:

  • Attitudes towards the transition away from print, which are becoming are more accepted for scholarly journals even as questions are being raised about monographs
  • The relative importance of new research practices
  • Discovery and other key workflow patterns and perceptions
  • Views among authors on dissemination and preservation of their work, including how they choose scholarly journals in which to publish and the role of repositories
  • Perceptions about the future role of the scholarly society
  • Comparisons will be provided with previous waves of the Ithaka S+R faculty survey, dating back to 2000.

Doing data in the social sciences and humanities: links to and from published work
Peter Burnhill
Director, EDINA, University of Edinburgh
Play (51min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

How should data feature in the scholarly publication process, and who should be doing what to ensure ease and continuity of access to those data that underpin statements in published work? Data drive their value as potential as evidence; being digital provides opportunity for valued-added curation but also liabiity for loss; being network-accessible is opportunity for linkage. Secondary analysis of the evidential value of data underpins scholarship but how should data feature in scholarly publication? There is threat of loss but also much opportunity for value-added curation and linkage. Who should be doing what to ensure ease and continuity of access to data used for published work? Just how different is ‘data’ across the disciplines – or is it all just digital?


Challenges for Journals in the Social Sciences & Humanities
Sarah Phibbs
Journals Publishing Director, Wiley-Blackwell
Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

There is an assumption in the journals publishing business that what happens first in STM will follow in social science and humanities. This presentation sets out to examine key challenges for social science and humanities in relation to scholarly communication, the differences and similarities with STM.


Half full or half empty? eBooks, the incomplete revolution
Alan Jarvis
Global Director, Social Science Books, Routledge
Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Factors in academic publishing in the humanities and social sciences, eBooks have failed to have the impact on book publishing that ejournals have had on journals. This presentation emphasises how relative diversity within books (in terms of both content and audience) has slowed the progress of ebooks, and looks at prospects for the future.


Publishing for HSS and STM: Differences of Kind or of Degree?
Geraldine Billingham
Editorial Director, Berg Publishers
Play (24min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

The term Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) covers a wide academic territory and successful publishing across these fields requires flexibility in product types, formats and pricing. While HSS and STM overlap, the differences between them are not just of degree but also of kind. Even so, the challenges of publishing in HSS may be as much to do with scale as they are to do with subject matter or academic culture.


Validating Scholarship in the 21st Century
Rebecca Cullen
Senior Online Product Development Manager, Oxford University Press
Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

The rise of online self-dissemination and new scholarly repositories has led to an increasing amount of research content bypassing traditional publishing channels. What is the role of the publisher in validating this content? A review of the forthcoming Oxford Bibliographies Online program as an attempt to address this question.


Exploring online delivery for social scientists
Martha Sedgwick
SAGE
Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

SAGE Research Methods Online is a research tool that integrates multiple book, reference and journal content types focused on an area central to the social sciences. This presentation will share results from the market research that was perforemd for this product development (due to be launched later in 2010) as we explored how our research methods book content should be delivered online to our social science users.


Digging into Data: Electronic publications in Archaeology
Michael Charno, Prof. Julian Richards
Archaeology Data Service
Play (39min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

The online peer-reviewed e-journal Internet Archaeology has been publishing archaeological research on the web since 1996. Rich text and image databases allow readers to ‘drill down’ from the text and to test existing interpretations and to make new ones. Increasingly we have also used web-based GIS to allow archaeologists to provide full interactive access to the spatial dimension of their research. This presentation will use exemplars developed under the AHRC and Mellon Foundation funded LEAP projects (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/leap/) to discuss the potential and challenges of this approach.


Licensing of digital Content to Intermediaries
Wulf von Lucius
Lucius & Lucius
Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Parallel to the licensing of content to libraries or providers like Amazon or Apple there are various platforms or service providers, which can be partners in the dissemination of contents. The paper describes the platform PaperC, a new start-up in Germany, which has developed an interesting model combining cost free reading with the charge for all other uses (like print out, edit, arrange, earmark etc.). The model has been developed with support of the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and the Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft Berlin. The developers as well as the intended main user group are students. PaperC is hence a model in the difficult B to C Market.


The following presentations are available for download.


Beyond Books - Billingham - Publishing for HSS and STM

Beyond Books - Burnhill - Doing data

Beyond Books - Charno - Digging into data

Beyond Books - Cullen - Flat Scholarship and Research

Beyond Books - Jarvis - eBooks after 10 years

Beyond Books - Lucius - Licensing of Digital Content to Intermediaries

Beyond Books - Maron - Ithaka SR Faculty Survey

Beyond Books - Phibbs - Social Science and Humanities Publishing

Beyond Books - Sedgwick - Exploring online delivery