A major new sci-tech search portal called Scitopia.org is scheduled to launch at the SLA annual meeting in the first week of June. A test version may actually launch a few weeks earlier. Thirteen scholarly society publishers are working together to create a free federated, vertical search portal capable of accessing some 3 million articles spanning as far back as 150 years, as well as some patents. A search on Scitopia.org will initiate simultaneous searches on all participating publishers' Web sites, will retrieve and merge results, and will present users with a relevant ranked list of bibliographic citations and abstracts from which they can choose the full-text articles they need. Acquiring the full-text articles will involve authentication to licensed subscriptions or pay-per-view payments....
Despite the direct relationship to authors and readers found in their memberships, scholarly society publishers have found competing in the Web world something of a struggle. The "big-deal" offers from commercial scholarly publishers eat up library serials budgets, pushing smaller publishers off the table and sometimes even luring societies to let commercial publishers take over their publications. At the same time, freebie services such as Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scirus, and Windows Live Academic Search lure away end-user eyeballs. Many scholarly society publishers open some of their content to Google Scholar and other services, but this experience hasn't satisfied the societies' interests or, in the opinion of some society publishing executives, even the users they serve....
Barbara Lange, director of product line management and publishing business development at IEEE, and Tim Ingoldsby, director of strategic initiatives and business development at the AIP, both pointed out that Google Scholar has a spidering schedule that could leave current articles stuck in a multiweek pipeline. Scitopia.org will offer real-time updating....
The content will also reach as far back as the societies carry content. For example, users will be able to reach 1.5 million documents dating from 1884 from IEEE; 410,000 dating from 1893 from APS; 390,200 dating from 1930 from AIP; 245,000 dating from 1874 from IOP; 235,000 dating from 1990 from SPIE; 99,700 dating from 1902 from the Electrochemical Society; and 51,806 dating from 1990 from SAE. Ingoldsby pointed out that low usage was often used to justify open access embargoes, for example, a 6-month delay. "That may be true in medicine and the life sciences," said Ingoldsby, "but it's less true in physics, more ‘less true' in chemistry, and most ‘less true' in mathematics." ...
In the case of material still in copyright, any payments might be owed to authors rather than the societies, if the society publisher had not had the prescience to get author agreements to concede electronic rights before electronic-information services existed. Lange stated that all those problems belong to the individual society publishers and their clients....
Comment. It looks like some societies are thinking that if they make their old articles easier to find, then they can generate extra revenue from access fees. That may be true. But I hope they also consider that if they make their old articles OA and easier to read, then they can generate extra citations.
Of course even those who pay for access may cite the articles they read. So this is not a simple trade-off between revenue and citations. But it is a trade-off between a small bump in paying readers, with a proportionally small bump in citations, and a large bump in non-paying readers, with a proportionally large bump in citations.
A few other ways to frame the issue: Which would generate more revenue, charging access fees for old articles or harnessing a larger impact factor to increase submissions and subscriptions? How much should publishers spend to make articles easier to find without making them easier to retrieve? If they're going to pave the path to a locked door, could they increase the return on their investment by unlocking the door and letting customers in to see, use, and tell others about the value to be found there?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/16/2007 03:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
