PKP 2007 – Some Additional Notes

The conference has been over for more than a week now, and many of the presentations have been blogged by the PKP team. Most of the conference presentations are abstracted at the conference website, and many have full text available.

I’d like to highlight a few of the presentations that I thought were really notable (from a librarian’s perspective), and then describe four of the sessions that were not blogged by the conference team.

• Challenging ISI Thomson Scientific’s Journal Citation Reports: Deconstructing “Objective”, “Impact”, and “Global” link
• Scholarly communication, open access, and the granularity issue link
• Synergies: The Canadian Information Network for Research link
• Rethinking Collections: Libraries and Librarians in an Open Age link

Four presentations not covered elsewhere:

Cooperative Publishing Model and Libraries.
“Raym Crow is a Senior Consultant with SPARC – The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. He will speak on publishing cooperatives and the various forms they might take for nonprofit publishers, including societies, university presses, and universities.”

This plenary introduced the idea of the cooperative as a solution to some of the challenges that scholarly and other smaller publishers face. The presentation is not available, but the idea is fully fleshed out in Chow’s PUBLISHING COOPERATIVES: AN ALTERNATIVE FOR SOCIETY PUBLISHERS. This looks to be a great suggestion.

Google Scholar Digitization initiatives
“Anurag Acharya is the Principal Engineer for Google Scholar. He will describe the evolution in general of Google Scholar and a more specific initiative – journal backfile digitization.”
This presentation invited libraries to contact Google for free scanning of their resources. The reception was a little cool, since it didn’t seem there was much in it for libraries – especially considering the falling prices of high-quality scanners.

Open Medicine: New Standards of Access and Independence
Anita Palepu, Editor, Open Medicine
“Presents the experience of founding a new independent open access medical journal in the wake of a controversial instance of editorial interference and suspension of academic freedom that had resulted in the firing of the Canadian Medical Association Journals editors, followed by the resigning of the remaining editors and board.”

This presentation reviewed the specific events that led to the creation of Open Medicine, and also summarized the issues of conflict of interest that fueled the action. Ms. Palepu also referenced several previous conflicts in medical journal publishing over similar issues, including those of the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1993, the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999, and the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999. The issues are presented in a joint paper available at the PKP website.

OA: Necessary but not sufficient
Michael Geist presented on the other conditions which must obtain for the “democratization of knowledge” that OA looks toward. Briefly, he sees 4 areas that need change: Access to content, Connectivity, Enhanced participation, and Copyright. I can’t see anything on his website that covers these points, but if I find anything I’ll link to it.