Services in the scientific publishing industry

The main objective of this line of research is to validate the LiquidPub approach, to assess its impact in terms of benefits and threats for the scientific community and the scientific publishing industry and identify innovative LiquidPub-inspired services which can be offered in the industry.

For this purpose, the research activities have focused on two main directions. The former aims at observing and reporting about the scientific publishing industry. This set of activities have focused on today’s market drivers and trends, and on their recent developments. Regarding this first goal, the research activities have focused on (1) examining the evolution of the scientific publishing industry over time and on (2) identifying innovative services that the actors in the sectors (with a particular focus on scientific publishers) may offer to the scientific community. Our research concentrated on describing:

• The scientific publishing industry and its evolution over time. The analysis sketches the main involved actors in the sector, the main phases of the whole publishing process and the peculiarities which characterize such a market.
• The evolution of the sector starting from the advent of the Internet to the impact of the more recent developments of the Web 2.0 technologies (which stands at the core of the Liquidpub project).
• The open issues that the introduction and use of the Web 2.0 technologies within the scientific publishing industry might raise, examining both theoretical and practical implications.
  

Furthermore, the research has also been inspired by the several exploitable results (tools, novel ideas, concept and models) developed by the partners in the project. Those results are software components and services that can be seen as potential products. The goal of this part of the research is to establish (if any) the proper market strategy for each of the potential products, taking into account market size, product maturity, consortium experience and capability. Regarding this second goal, the research activities have focused on identifying:

• High level ideas about new publication models in the LiquidPub contest 
• The services a Liquidpub environment might offer, in particular:
• The business aspects linked to Liquidjournal
  
• The business aspects linked to Liquidbook
  
• The business aspects linked to the "Liquidpub-inspired scientific publisher"

  Documents

"Towards an Web 2.0 Scientific Publishing Industry", Roberta Cuel, Diego Ponte, Alessandro Rossi

Accepted at the 10th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM 09), Università Degli Studi di Padova, Vicenza, Italy. September, 3-4 2009.

Abstract: In the so called knowledge based economy, the collaborative and open way of generating and managing knowledge has been growingly seen as an essential activity to foster innovation, economic growth and social development in several applied fields. Thanks to the diffusion of the Internet, the Web and social network applications, people interact and collaborate in order to create, share and disseminate pictures, video and knowledge. The interest in this topic stems from the observation that while the Internet and the Web are positively affecting both social and business aspects of life (The Economist, 2008; King, 2008; McAfee, 2006) their influence on the scientific publishing sector seems to be still marginal. While scholars are still debating on the impact of the so called Open Access philosophy and its economic sustainability, Web 2.0 applications (such as Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Threadless) might radically affect the scholar sector and in particular the way in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. Moreover, many specific scientific publishing initiatives are facing on the Web. Among others the most interesting are PLOS one (http://www.plosone.org), ArXiv (http://Arxiv.org), Nature Network (http://network.nature.com); SSRN (http://www.ssrn.com) and Sprouts (http://sprouts.aisnet.org). Although, these initiatives are raising new open issues on several social and knowledge aspects of scientific creation and dissemination, their effects are even less explored than Open Access. This paper explores the impact of the Internet, the Web and other collaborative platforms on the whole scientific publishing sector. This analysis shows that authors, readers and scientific publishers bear some interesting peculiarities which should be taken carefully into account in order to shed light on threats and opportunities of Open Access and Web 2.0 initiatives.

"Towards open source science? An analysis of web 2.0 based initiatives in the scientific publishing sector", Roberta Cuel, Ralf Gerstner, Diego Ponte

Accepted at the 3rd FLOSS International Workshop on Free/Libre Open Source Software", Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy, July, 2-3 2009.

Abstract: Internet is consistently shaping the way scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated. While initially the advent of the Internet allowed to fasten and to enhance many of the services offered by traditional scientific publishers, a multiplicity of innovative applications inspired by the collaborative potentials of the so called Web 2.0, have recently pushed the sector to a second renewing process. In spite of the burgeoning number of initiatives that are providing traditional and new services in innovative ways, there is no clear understanding on how and to what extent these initiatives might affect the publishing sector as a whole. The aim of this paper is to propose a first non exhaustive overview of services provided by scientific publishers before and after the advent of the Internet and to review the large arena of Web 2.0 based initiatives provided by publishers, scientific communities, and other new competitors. Authors want to demonstrate that the advent of the Internet first, and the development of Web 2.0 applications second, challenge the scientific publishing market and the business models of publishers.

"Internet-based review models for scientific knowledge: a radical innovation?", Pier Franco Camussone, Roberta Cuel, Diego Ponte

Accepted at the 11th European Conference on Knowledge Management, Famalicao, Portugal, September, 2-3, 2010.

D6.2. Report on Communication, Dissemination and Validation Activities CNRS, IIIA-CSIC, SPRINGER, UNIFR, UNITN.

In what follows, we provide a detailed description of the dissemination activities we have set up in our first year. We have listed our dissemination activities along five axes: (a) contacts with private  and  institutional  partners  that  may  contribute  to  the  implementation of  the  project;  (b)  inbound discussions and brainstorming around the core concepts of LiquidPub; (c) outbound dissemination activities for a larger audience; (d) participation to high-level scientific conferences and  publications,  web-publications  and  for  a;  (e)  LiquidPub  portal,  Web  site,  and  open  source access to contributions. Our activities of dissemination have covered different media, such as online  conferences,  videos,  newspapers,  academic  journals,  blogs,  small  workshops,  large  conferences, thus providing us with a broader vision of the potential impact of the LiquidPub project.

  Presentations

“How Science 2.0 Is Affecting The Scientific Publishing Industry: An Analysis Of The Web2.0-Based Scientific Knowledge Production Initiatives”, Roberta Cuel, Diego Ponte, Alessandro Rossi

Poster presented at CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6). University of Geneva (Switzerland), June, 16-18 2009.

Abstract: In the last decade, the Internet has extensively shaped several dimensions of the social and business sectors. First of all, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) allow to cut the costs of sending information and raising efficiency. Second, an increasing number of Web 2.0 initiatives offer a collaborative and open way of generating, organizing, and managing knowledge. While ICT permitted the whole sector to shift from a paper-based to a digital-based medium, nowadays several Web 2.0 initiatives are exploring innovative ways of scientific knowledge production and dissemination. In particular:

• Some internationally recognized journals are adopting an open/collaborative process of review/evaluation (e.g., arXiv, Nature Precendings, PlosOne)
• Some initiatives permit the so called social bookmarking and tagging of Web resources (e.g. Connotea, CiteULike, Del.icio.us, BibSonomy)
• Several services allow researchers to create and maintain blogs, wikis, and participating in social networks (e.g. ResearchBlogging, ScienceBlog)
• Innovative tools allow the collaborative writing of documents (e.g. Google docs)
• New actors such as Google are shaping the citation indexing and search engine initiatives (e.g. Google Scholar)
• Complex projects attempt to provide complete platforms for the above mentioned initiatives (e.g. 2collab, Nature Network, Liquidpub).

While this burgeoning number of initiatives indicates that the potentials benefits the Web 2.0 utilization gathered attention from actors of the whole sector, the diversity and inconsistencies among these initiatives show that the field is still a “work in progress” and no common understanding on what a “Science 2.0” should be, has been achieved. To understand the potential benefits and weaknesses of such initiatives we compare them with services provided by traditional scientific publishers. This analysis allows us to highlight where and to what extent innovative services might compete with or affect the traditional ones.