STM Spring Conference 2010

play Welcome and Opening
Jayne Marks
STM chair, Vice President, Sage Publications, Inc.

play Keynote: Research, Results, and Rewards: How is the Academy Changing?
Gretchen M. Bataille
President, University of North Texas Academic rewards come in the form of promotion and tenure, and success is primarily measured by articles and books published and grants received. In a changing technological environment, students read from e-books and scholars publish in open access online journals. How are these changes affecting the publishers of traditional print journals, libraries, and the very process of tenure and promotion itself?

play User Behavior & Industry Trends – Designing apps, new media features, everything for the end user
Andrea Kravetz
Vice President, User Centered Design, Elsevier The first step in designing new products, features or applications is to understand the user. Various tools and techniques exist for conducting user research. The user research provides insights into user behavior. The user insights drive new innovative concepts thatt can be tested with the user. The user is the focus of the entire development process. The end result is a product or application that exceeds the user’s expectations. Several examples of how understanding users needs, environments and behaviours lead to innoative products will be reviewed.

play Give the People What They Want: Patron Driven Acquisition
Deborah Lenares
Clapp Library – Wellesley College The convergence of ebook availability, new business models and the economic crisis has speeded library adoption of Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA). Publishers Communication Group has surveyed academic librarians in the U.S. to understand how they select a PDA program, how library purchasing is changing, and what features are particularly important to them. Survey results will be reported on and discussed by a librarian with experience adminstering PDA in academic and corporate libraries.

play The World is Open, Not Flat
William Park
CEO, DeepDyve Historically, academic and scholarly publishing has exhibited many characteristics of so-called ‘closed’ industries where customers/end-users had limited or unfriendly tools to get what they want; long waiting periods for production and fulfillment; and expensive prices to boot. These dynamics have led to a call for more ‘openness’, such as the NIH ruling and the open access movement, and drawn the interest of technology companies who would like to capitalize on these inefficiences. While moving to openness can bear risk, it can also bear opportunity. In the realm of ‘unintended consequences’, creating better, faster, cheaper products also creates new markets and new customers previously unimagined.

play Panel Q & A: What does the user really want? Examining channels, behavior, and business models
Moderator: Tim Collins
Presenters: Andrea Kravetz, Deborah Lenares and William Park

play Keynote: One Scientist’s Wish List for STM Publishers
Philip Bourne
Editor-in-Chief, PloS Computational Biology The scholarly output of an academic scientist continues to change in an on-line world. Slowly the review and reward system is coming to appreciate this change. Will the contract between scientist and publisher change to be more than one of handling final manuscripts to one of maintaining the workflow of scholarly discourse – ideas, hypotheses, protocols, data, interpretations of these data, and conclusions, all in a variety of formats and modes of dissemination. Small steps are best and are already under way. Bourne will discuss some of these steps and what might come next from the perspective of a scientist excited by the prospects.

play Scholarship in the Age of Immediacy
Christopher Winship
Professor, Harvard University and Editor, Sage Publications How will scholars interact in the future? Winship discusses how radically his own practices have changed, problems with current
delivery systems, information overload, and the rigidity of the current structure. Are intermediary structures, an
Amazon for journal articles, the answer?

play Keynote: Beyond Topical Relevance: How Scholars Choose Articles to Read
Suzie Allard
School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee When faced with numerous articles on their topic, how do scholars make the decision of which articles to read? A recent study, commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium, asked scholars to rank which article characteristics are most important to them, including journal stature, journal familiarity, type of publisher, author stature, and so on. Respondents were then asked to choose from composite profiles of articles using some of these characteristics to measure how important characteristics are when readers are faced with choices and tradeoffs. A pilot study suggested that article stature and title are important; this talk will present findings from the full study of hundreds of scholars in multiple institutions.

play Inviting Silicon Valley through the academic publishing door
Jason Hoyt
Research Director at Mendeley.com Think your market is saturated? Think again. Content producers have benefited by opening their doors to third-party developers. The ‘doors’ include API platforms, special HTML markups, and more. Creating an environment of content mashups delivers not only new tools to users, but also more eyeballs and revenue streams to the content providers. However, opening the door isn’t enough, it needs to be done right and we’ll discuss what can be done in this regard.

play From readers to users: NPG’s Article Improvement Project
Dan Pollock
Associate Director, nature.com, Nature Publishing Group How the changing needs and business models of the online world are dragging the venerable journal article kicking and screaming into the early 21st Century. We take a look at the features and thinking behind some of the changes NPG is making to the way in which it presents journal articles online, and also take a look at how NPG is engaging its readership through other digital channels.

play Panel Q & A: Getting to the Content: Rethinking publishing models
Moderator: Howard Ratner
Presenters: Ramy Arnaout, Jason Hoyt and Dan Pollock

play Scholarly Publishing Roundtable
H. Frederick Dylla
Executive Director and CEO, American Institute of Physics Public access to publications of research results has been the subject of an ongoing and too-often polarized debate. The debate is occurring in the context of scholarly publishing undergoing significant transformation as web-driven technologies affect how science is done, communicated, and published. Within the scholarly publishing and academic communities there are many voices either advocating for free public access or cautioning about specific pathways for obtaining such a noble goal. In an effort to find common ground, the Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), convened last June the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. Its participants were drawn from the key stakeholders in the debate: academic administration, researchers, libraries, and publishers. The roundtable participants issued a report in January of this year

play ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID)
Howard Ratner
Chief Technology Officer, Executive VP, Nature Publishing Group Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems embedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Our mission is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.

play Q & A: Updates on important initiatives for scholarly publishers
H. Frederick Dylla and Howard Ratner