A copy of the report can be found at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm

American Physical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), Nature Publishing Group, and other CrossRef participating publishers announced a new initiative this spring with Google™. In partner-ship with Google search technologies, the publishers offer search results at their Web sites that link to content via DOI’s (Digital Object Identifiers) or URL’s. In addition, publishers’ full text content also shows up in results in the main Google.com index. Launched cooperatively some years back among several science publishers, CrossRef is a “reference-linking” service for scholarly publishing, that facilitates reading of full-text articles referenced in a paper across publishers. This new CrossRef Search is free and enables scholars to perform cross-publisher, full-text searches of the latest scholarly research. To evaluate functionality this CrossRef-Google pilot runs through 2004. So check it out and send feedback. IOPoffers the service at http://www.iop.org/EJ/search_crossref. It can also be found on the Web sites of the other eight participating publishers. CrossRef is in discussion with other search engines about similar projects.

The open-access arXiv (Cornell University; formerly Los Alamos) has a new screening process for its articles for first -time submitters or for submitters in new categories. New users will need to seek endorsement by established users. The new system will verify that contributors belong to the scientific community and will ensure that content is relevant to current research, all at a much lower cost than conventional peer-reviewed journals. Also there will be “autoendorsements” of authors based on criteria, such as academic affiliation. http://www.arxiv.org

Changes continue for science publishers. In the spring of 2004 Springer Science + Business Media merged with Kluwer Academic Publishers. Together the companies publish 1,350 journals and more than 5,000 books each year, with revenues of about 880 million euros. Re-named “Springer”, both are currently owned by leading European private equity houses Cinven and Candover. Springer will be the world’s second largest academic publisher behind Elsevier Science. In early July Springer unveiled a new “Open Choice” program for authors in their journals. Authors may now choose to make their articles available to readers for free on SpringerLink, for a price of $3,000 per article. Giving its own finger-post nod to open access, Amsterdam-based Elsevier announced in July a new “postprint archiving” policy for its some 1,800 journals. Postprint archiving (posting an article after publication) requires the consent of the copyright holder. Authors may post the final version of their articles on “pre-print servers and the authors’ personal or institutional Web sites”, as long as it is not “a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect”. This step by Elsevier is considered large for authors (as to facilitating open access) but small for libraries (as to budget/price relief).

In January 2004 the U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted a set of recommendations for FY 2005’s federal budget. One key recommendation would have the National Institutes of Health(NIH) put a condition on its research grants so that articles based on NIH-funded research would be electronically deposited in PubMed Central(PMC), the NIH’s open-access database. The exact language of the recommendation is not yet published, but reports indicate that any work supported by NIH grants or contracts would be made available immediately or within 6 months by the National Library of Medicine. It will be the responsibility of the grantee, not the grantee’s publisher, to deposit the text, a peer-reviewed postprint. NIH is instructed to submit an implementation plan to the Committee by December 1, 2004.

The University of California became an institutional member of the Public Library of Science in the spring. PLoS is a “non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.” http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ PLoS founders won one of the 14 Rave Awards from Wired magazine in 2004.

An April 2004 Credit Suisse First Boston financial report on the ScienceTechnologyMedical journal industry by S. Mays-Smith et al lists “three pillars” of STM publisher profits: copyright, peer review, and bundling. Until one or more teeter publishers are seen as secure. But bundling is facing difficulties, as a growing number of the well-reputed academic institutions reject outright or successfully barter-down bundled offerings at license renewal times. Bundling is when all (or most) journals by a publisher are offered to institutional subscribers “only” as a set for annual purchase, with high package prices. The same report named three factors expected to slow the adoption of open access/OA as opposed to toll-access journals: 1) those who benefit financially from OA cannot easily act in unison and gain little by acting alone; 2) most authors transfer copyright to journals; and 3) a large number of journals still use the “Ingelfinger rule”, the in-house rule prohibiting “prior publication” of submitted articles.

For a compilation of copyright and open access preprint information concerning publishers, consult the Sherpa/Romeo database hosted by the University of Nottingham, UK. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

Open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) announced in May 2004 that Finland has made a national deal for all universities, polytechnics, and research institutes in Finland to become BMC members. The membership, the first national agreement of its kind for BMC, covers the cost of publication for researchers in BMC’s journals. The agreement was struck through the national electronic library of Finland and will cover more than 25,000 publicly funded researchers and teachers in the country.

Book publishing was sharply up (19% in the U.S.) in 2003, per the R. R. Bowker Company. Bowker states that some 175,000 new titles and editions were published last year. The increase was largely generated by middle and small size publishers, with the top 12 trade-houses reflecting only a 2.4% rise in number of new titles. Still there was bad news for university presses. The Christian Science Monitor (April 2004) counted some 95 university presses and $444 million in sales (2002) in the U.S. Bowker reports that in 2003 the number of books published by university presses fell 2.2%, to about 12,000.

Through the vendor ProQuest you may search the Los Angeles Times back to 1881. http://uclibs.org/PID/11379 The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are also searchable historically.
  

Books may be up in numbers but readers are down, per a National Endowment for the Arts’ Reading at Risk summer report. Based on a sample size of more than 17,000 adults, the study found just 46.7 percent of Americans read for pleasure in 2002, compared with 56.9 in 1982. The steepest decline was among young adults, 25 to 34 years old, with only 47.7% of them enjoying non-required reading. Readers were more likely to play an active role in their communities, with more involvement in cultural, sports and volunteer activities than non-readers. The most important influence on readers and non-readers is education, with 74 percent of adults with a graduate education reported as readers. “Reading is not a timeless, universal capability,” states Dana Gioia, Chairman, National Endowment of the Arts, in the preface. “Advanced literacy is a specific intellectual skill and social habit that depends on a great many educational, cultural, and economic factors. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose.” http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html

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