Research, Access and Innovation: Workshopping the Future of Scholarly Communication and Publishing
Colin Steele, Adjunct Professor Roger Clarke and Professor John Houghton will lead a post conference workshop between 9:30am and noon on Friday, 26 September 2008. They will focus on the economics, opportunities, advantages and elements of new publishing models that support open access and are evolving in this digital age. The goal of the workshop will be to explore new publishing models that provide advantages for publishers to support open access and identify the possible value-adding services that can be delivered, creating new income streams.
09:30 Introduction - Research, Access and Innovation. Innovation depends upon the open and effective distribution of research outputs - Colin Steele
09:40 Innovation in the Instrumentalist Disciplines and Professions. A Diagramatic Introduction - Roger Clarke
09:45 Innovation and the Future of Journals in the Electronic Era - Roger Clarke
The primary vehicle for formal communications in most disciplines and research domains is articles published in journals. The digital era as a whole has had many impacts on the activities of article creation and use. The availability of the Internet as a distribution mechanism has brought about significant changes in the economics of journal publishing. The dimensions of those changes are examined within the context provided by models of the roles of journals in the mid-to-late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. The cost-profiles of alternative journal-publication models are considered, and tensions between for-profit and open-access publishing identified.
10:05 The Future is an Open Book. Open Access Monographs - A Global Perspective - Colin Steele
University publishing and scholarly communication settings are currently balkanised, especially in terms of the scholarly monograph and the distribution of its content. Institutional frameworks need to be reassessed so that OA presses become an integral part of the research frameworks of universities. In that context, e-Press costs are relatively low but the rewards are high, locally, nationally and globally. The twenty-first century can be one in which university press publishing goes 'back to the future', in that institutions return to take a responsibility for the effective distribution of their scholars' research. This process will result in scholarship that combines authority with public accessibility within digital frameworks.
10:30 Coffee Break
10:50 Scholarly Communication Opportunities and Impacts - John Houghton
Scholarly communication faces new demands and new opportunities, with open access enabling greater use of research findings, thereby increasing returns to public investment in research and fostering innovation - a key driver of wealth creation. While debate has focused on scholarly communication and, more narrowly, publishing costs, few have explored the potential benefits of alternative models. And yet, to develop the most cost-effective scholarly communication system, rather than simply the cheapest, we need to understand both the costs and the benefits. This paper reports on recent research on the system-wide costs, impacts and benefits of alternative scholarly communication models.
11:20 Round table Discussion
12:00 Close
Colin Steele is Emeritus Fellow at the Australian National University, Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Convenor of the National Scholarly Communications Forum. He has published and spoken widely on scholarly communication issues both in Australia and overseas.
Colin’s article “Scholarly Monograph Publishing in the 21st Century: The Future More Than Ever Should Be an Open Book” has been published in Spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
His website is at http://anulib.anu.edu.au/about/steele/.
Roger Clarke is an eBusiness consultant, and a Visiting Professor at several Universities. He will speak primarily to the following papers: Clarke R. & Kingsley D. (2008) 'ePublishing's Impacts on Journals and Journal Articles' forthcoming in Journal of Internet Commerce 7, 1 (March 2008), PrePrint at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ePublAc.html.
Clarke R. (2007) 'Business Models to Support Content Commons' SCRIPT-ed Special Issue on 'Creating Commons' 4,1 (2007) 59-71 at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol4-1/clarke.asp.
John Houghton is currently Professorial Fellow at Victoria University's Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) and Director of the Centre's Information Technologies and the Information Economy Program.
John has a number of years experience in information technology policy, more general industry policy and related economic research. He has published and spoken widely on information technology, industry, and science and technology policy issues. John's research projects include reports for DEST on changing research practices and research communication costs, emerging opportunities and benefits (http://dspace.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/44485), development of the Economic and Social Impacts of Open Access research agenda (http://www.cfses.com/projects/Easi-OA.htm) and work on the economic impacts of alternative publishing models for JISC in the UK(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/EconomicsScholarlyPublishing.aspx).
See: http://www.netspeed.com.au/jhoughton/ and http://www.cfses.com/staff/jhoughton.htm.