STM Spring Conference 2010
Users, customers, practitioners & librarians talk - Publishers are you listening?

Tuesday, April 27

Wednesday April 28

8:45am - 9:00am

Welcome and Opening

Jayne Marks, STM chair, Vice President, Sage Publications, Inc.

Keynote: Research, Results, and Rewards: How is the Academy Changing?

Gretchen M. Bataille, President, University of North Texas

Academic rewards come in the form of promotion and tenure, and success is primarily measured by articles and books published and grants received. In a changing technological environment, students read from e-books and scholars publish in open access online journals. How are these changes affecting the publishers of traditional print journals, libraries, and the very process of tenure and promotion itself?

http://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium

http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess

Panel: What does the user really want? Examining channels, behavior, and business models

Moderator: Tim Collins, President, EBSCO Publishing

User Behavior & Industry Trends - Designing apps, new media features, everything for the end user
Andrea Kravetz, Vice President, User Centered Design, Elsevier

The first step in designing new products, features or applications is to understand the user. Various tools and techniques exist for conducting user research. The user research provides insights into user behavior. The user insights drive new innovative concepts thatt can be tested with the user. The user is the focus of the entire development process. The end result is a product or application that exceeds the user's expectations. Several examples of how understanding users needs, environments and behaviours lead to innoative products will be reviewed.

Converting the Library to E-books - drivers, options, obstacles, incentives, outcomes - so far

Bradley E. Gernand, Library Manager, Institute for Defense Analyses Library

Change is the byword of our age. Many established publishing houses with venerable and respected content find themselves playing an entirely new game. In this talk, Gernand outlines his library's proactive approach to the new era. He defines the problems they encountered in switching from print to online books, the budget approach they adopted as a result of the changes they enacted, and the success they have encountered - along with some of the unexpected changes necessitated by the arrival of e-books. In many ways a case study, Gernand also presents publishers with several suggestions on how to proceed in the future, particularly in supporting their customers - libraries in what will, in future years, be a decidedly more difficult budget environment. Change is not necessarily bad, Gernand cautions . . . merely different, and it presents several opportunities.

Give the People What They Want: Patron Driven Acquisition
Deborah Lenares, Manager Acquisitions, Serials and Interlibrary Loan, Science Collection Management Librarian, Clapp Library - Wellesley College

The convergence of ebook availability, new business models and the economic crisis has speeded library adoption of Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA). Publishers Communication Group has surveyed academic librarians in the U. S. to understand how they select a PDA program, how library purchasing is changing, and what features are particularly important to them. Survey results will be reported on and discussed by a librarian with experience adminstering PDA in academic and corporate libraries.

The World is Open, Not Flat

William Park, CEO, DeepDyve

Historically, academic and scholarly publishing has exhibited many characteristics of so-called 'closed' industries where customers/end-users had limited or unfriendly tools to get what they want; long waiting periods for production and fulfillment; and expensive prices to boot. These dynamics have led to a call for more 'openness', such as the NIH ruling and the open access movement, and drawn the interest of technology companies who would like to capitalize on these inefficiences. While moving to openness can bear risk, it can also bear opportunity. In the realm of 'unintended consequences', creating better, faster, cheaper products also creates new markets and new customers previously unimagined.

12:30pm - 2:15pm

2:15pm - 2:30pm

2:30pm - 3:30pm

Lunch

Introduction to Afternoon: Jerry Cowhig, Managing Director,

Institute of Physics Publishing

Keynote: One Scientist's Wish List for STM Publishers

Philip Bourne, Ph.D., Department of Pharmacology & Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Science, University of California, San Diego, Editor-in-Chief, PloS Computational Biology

The scholarly output of an academic scientist continues to change in an on-line world. Slowly the review and reward system is coming to appreciate this change. Will the contract between scientist and publisher change to be more than one of handling final manuscripts to one of maintaining the workflow of scholarly discourse - ideas, hypotheses, protocols, data, interpretations of these data, and conclusions, all in a variety of formats and modes of dissemination. Small steps are best and are already under way. Bourne will discuss some of these steps and what might come next from the perspective of a scientist excited by the prospects.

3:30pm - 4:00pm

Break

4:00pm - 5:30pm

Panel: The new contracts: researcher, practitioner, publisher, library

Moderator: Andrea Powell, Executive Director, Publishing, CABI

Scholarship in the Age of Immediacy

Christopher Winship, Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, and member of the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Winship is editor of Sociological Methods + Research and is a faculty associate of the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Science, and the Harvard Science, Technology + Society program.

How will scholars interact in the future? Winship discusses how radically his own practices have changed, problems with current
 delivery systems, information overload,  and  the rigidity of the current structure.  Are intermediary structures,  an 
Amazon for journal articles, the answer?

End User is 'King' - Academic libraries working to make a difference now and in the future

Dr. Hazel Woodward, University Librarian, and Director of Cranfield University Press, Kings Norton Library, Cranfield University, UK

The academic information environment is changing rapidly. Learning and teaching is being transformed as the Google Generation move into higher education. Research is becoming internationalized, collaborative and often visual. Listening to, and understanding our users is a top priority for librarians. Hazel will discuss how, acting on feedback from users, librarians are revolutionizing and re-shaping their services.

Expectations of immediate and effortless access: A corporate librarian's point of view

Lou Ann DiNallo, Director, Research & Development Informatics, Bristol- Myers Squibb

The degree to which information generated within the enterprise or created outside the company is effectively and efficiently managed, shared, organized and acted upon will be a differentiator of the next generation BioPharma. Expectations are high that information will be available immediately and effortlessly.

Corporate libraries are looking beyond conventional ways of providing products and services and seeking opportunities that will encourage the creation of an integrated and well organized information model that saves time and money by increasing the quality and speed of critical decision making. What are the obstacles and incentives for the library to do this? How can publishers help the process of information discovery and usage? Do current practices hinder this process?

6:00pm - 7:30pm

Evening Reception at the Le Meridien - MIT

Thursday, April 29

7:45am - 8:45am

8:45am - 9:00am

Continental Breakfast

Introduction to Morning: Audrey D. Melkin, Director of Business

Development, Atypon Systems, Inc.

9:00am - 10:00am

Keynote: Beyond Topical Relevance: How Scholars Choose Articles to Read
Carol Tenopir, Chancellor's Professor, School of Information Sciences, Director of Research and Director of the Center for Information and Communication Studies, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee

When faced with numerous articles on their topic, how do scholars make the decision of which articles to read? A recent study, commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium, asked scholars to rank which article characteristics are most important to them, including journal stature, journal familiarity, type of publisher, author stature, and so on. Respondents were then asked to choose from composite profiles of articles using some of these characteristics to measure how important characteristics are when readers are faced with choices and tradeoffs. A pilot study suggested that article stature and title are important; this talk will present findings from the full study of hundreds of scholars in multiple institutions.

10:30am - 12:00pm

Panel: Getting to the Content: Rethinking publishing models
Moderator: Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer, Executive Vice President, Nature Publishing Group

Why should scientists spend about a half-billion minutes a year searching for biomedical literature online?

Ramy Arnaout, MD, PhD, CEO, Pubget

Every year scientists and researchers waste a half-billion minutes searching for the papers they need to do their job. They waste this time and don't even know it. Researchers think of it as just part of the process. This is the story of how the speaker co-founded Pubget, a company built around getting papers fast. Arnout will discuss the problem, the first idea and the team that made the idea a reality. He will conclude with lessons learned about the current state of paper search from the perspective of scientists and researchers, and some speculation about the road ahead.

Inviting Silicon Valley through the academic publishing door

Jason Hoyt, PhD is the Research Director atMendeley.com.

Think your market is saturated? Think again. Content producers have benefited by opening their doors to third-party developers. The 'doors' include API platforms, special HTML markups, and more. Creating an environment of content mashups delivers not only new tools to users, but also more eyeballs and revenue streams to the content providers. However, opening the door isn't enough, it needs to be done right and we'll discuss what can be done in this regard.

From readers to users: NPG's Article Improvement Project

Dan Pollock, Associate Director, nature.com, Nature Publishing Group

How the changing needs and business models of the online world are dragging the venerable journal article kicking and screaming into the early 21st Century. We take a look at the features and thinking behind some of the changes NPG is making to the way in which it presents journal articles online, and also take a look at how NPG is engaging its readership through other digital channels.

Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and CEO, American Institute

of Physics

Public access to publications of research results has been the subject of an ongoing and too-often polarized debate. The debate is occurring in the context of scholarly publishing undergoing significant transformation as web-driven technologies affect how science is done, communicated, and published. Within the scholarly publishing and academic communities there are many voices either advocating for free public access or cautioning about specific pathways for obtaining such a noble goal.  In an effort to find common ground, the Committee on Science and Technology of the United States House of Representatives, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), convened last June the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. Its participants were drawn from the key stakeholders in the debate: academic administration, researchers, libraries, and publishers. The roundtable participants issued a report in January of this year *.  Subsequent public reactions to the report's recommendations and possible next steps by the stakeholders in this arena will be discussed.

*http://science.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=2710

ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID)

Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer, Executive Vice President,

Nature Publishing Group & Philip Bourne, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, PloS Computational Biology

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems embedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry's de facto standard. Our mission is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.

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