Trip Report: PKP Conference 2007

Notes have been taken by Robert and Christina during PKP conference in Vancouver.

Note: There is a conference blog available. Presentations can be found here

Cornelius Puschmann: eLanguage.net
see also http://scholarlypublishing.blogspot.com/2007/07/elanguagenet-shifting-paradigm-in.html

eLanguage.net will host 10 online journals for LSA (the Linguist Society of America). Thus, being in contact with him will make it easier for us to evaluate possibilities for Living Reviews journals in the field.

Anurag Achary, Google Scholar
Google Scholar is about to solve the findability part of accessibility. Their goal is to provide the best possible scholarly search, in particular in terms of coverage: Cover as many languages as possible and as many sources as possible.

The interface (i.e. search results) is build around the notion of common operations (and the quality is measured in time to task completion):


 * find key articles in area (ranked)
 * find relevant recent articles in area (ranked)
 * explore scholarly neighborhood (i.e. related articles)
 * locate/access article/book
 * cite

Ranking means using weighed sources of quality.

Some lessons:


 * nobody uses categories.
 * link resolvers are the remaining vital part of infrastructure that libraries should provide.
 * library links in google scholar are used a lot: 10-20% clickthrough!

Good quote (answering the request for a open-access-only filter option): "The alternative to frustration is ignorance"

"metasearch is a dead end"

Ryan Crow, Sparc: Publishing Cooperatives
some new numbers:


 * 23.000 scholarly journals + 3.5%/year
 * for-profit journals increasing at 2X rate of society journals
 * 68% commercially owned journals

price index:
 * 4-5X commercially-published journals
 * 3X commercially-published society journals
 * 1X university sponsored
 * 1X self-published society journals


 * 40% print-only

commercial publishers:
 * increased demand for online access and functionality, exodus from self-publishing

society publishers:


 * insufficient staff resources, core competence in content and certification
 * lack of investment capital, hinders response to market demand, impedes tech. innovation
 * innate conservatism
 * marginal market power (as buyers/sellers)

crow described how cooperatives offer solutions to these problems, by providing
 * business management services
 * scale-economy bargaining
 * marketing services
 * digital hosting & publishing services

Our talks
blogged by some people there:
 * http://scholarlypublishing.blogspot.com/2007/07/interoperable-epublishing-software.html
 * http://scholarlypublishing.blogspot.com/2007/07/living-reviews-open-access-online.html

The slides may be found here.

side-tracked
We managed to contact meet/talk to most of the people of interest with respect to interoperability of journal software:


 * David Ruddy (http://dpubs.org/)
 * Alec Smecher (lead developer for [OJS])
 * Ross Coleman ([APSR], see [abstract] of talk)