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July News from ICSTI
- To: Multiple recipients of list <epc-l@iucr.org>
- Subject: July News from ICSTI
- From: Howard Flack <Howard.Flack@cryst.unige.ch>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 10:46:38 +0100 (BST)
Please find attached the latest news from Executive Director, Barry Mahon. News for ICSTI Members, July 20 2001 1. More on "free" publications At http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ You will find the following paper: Online or Invisible? by Steve Lawrence, NEC Research Institute Summary: Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access. Extract: "….We analyzed 119,924 conference articles in computer science and related disciplines, obtained from DBLP (dblp.uni-trier.de). In computer science, conference articles are typically formal publications and are often more prestigious than journal articles, with acceptance rates at some conferences below 10%. Citation counts and online availability were estimated using ResearchIndex. The analysis excludes self-citations, where a citation is considered to be a self-citation if one or more of the citing and cited authors match. Figure 1 shows the probability that an article is freely available online as a function of the number of citations to the article, and the year of publication of the article. The results are dramatic. There is a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited, and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online……" An edited version appears in: Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001. 2. and again…. At: http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/Rosenzweig.html You will find…. DEAR COLLEAGUE: Please join me in DECLARING INDEPENDENCE from publishers and journals that do not serve the research community. We scientists can exercise control of our journals. We can transform them from commercial commodities back to instruments of service to education and research. When we are in control, we fulfil our responsibility to ourselves, to society, to our institutions, and to our colleagues throughout the world. In recent times, purely commercial interests have gained sway over too many of the journals that we depend on for research information. Maximizing profits has become the controlling goal. A system that should serve us is at the mercy of corporate acquisitions and profit-oriented planners. Disseminating scholarly research seems to be an afterthought. I speak from first-hand experience of what happens when profits take over. In 1986, I started a journal in the field of evolutionary ecology. The initial subscription price was $35 per year for individuals, $100 for libraries. Within a twelve-year period, during which the journal changed ownership twice, the price for libraries had grown to nearly $800 per year, an average annual increase of 19%. I did the math. I estimated that my publisher pocketed profit of between $170,000 and $220,000 annually, a mark-up of about 275% and a profit margin of nearly 75%. After the second change in ownership, my editorial board and I launched our own independent, competitive journal, Evolutionary Ecology Research. Using common sense and prudent management, we have been able to set reasonable prices, use technology to speed up the review and publication process, and attract the leading lights of the field to our new journal. We did it, and you can too. Though I would not recommend our strategy to everyone, there are alternatives to commercial publication. You can start by reviewing this handbook to determine whether your journal serves the needs of its community. If it does not, you can use the handbook to explore and evaluate alternatives to your present situation. We scientists are naturally curious explorers. Please be curious about the way your journal is run. And if you don't like what you find, explore ways of DECLARING INDEPENDENCE. Michael L. Rosenzweig Editor-in-Chief, Evolutionary Ecology Research Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona -- Howard Flack http://www.unige.ch/crystal/ahdf/Howard.Flack.html Laboratoire de Cristallographie Phone: +41 22 702 62 49 24 quai Ernest-Ansermet mailto:Howard.Flack@cryst.unige.ch CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland Fax: +41 22 702 61 08
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