THIRD BLOOMSBURY CONFERENCE ON E-PUBLISHING AND E-PUBLICATIONS,
25 & 26 JUNE 2009

BEYOND BOOKS AND JOURNALS

An independent conference organised from the Centre for Publishing/Department of Information Studies at University College London


This conference follows the format of its two highly successful predecessors (for the programmes of these earlier events see the links to your left).


Theme of the Conference:

BEYOND BOOKS AND JOURNALS looks at formal scholarly communication from the outside, from the perspective of the changing characteristics of the digital environment and what they mean to the scholarly community and the publishers serving them. The programme will be grounded in an attempt to understand why the journal article and the monograph (with the main emphasis on the journal article) have exhibited such powers of endurance over more than a decade. However is becoming clear that the workflow of scholars, where they find information and how they use it, is changing significantly. What will this mean for publications, for scholars, publishers and librarians?

Audience:

This conference is unique. All those working with researchers especially publishers and librarians and of course scholars themselves will find an unprecedented bringing together of research on the scholarly communication process

Location:

The Archaeology Lecture Theatre at University College London – London’s Global University – and associated facilities. It is located in the Institute of Archaeology, Gordon Street, opposite the Bloomsbury Theatre.

Conference fees: see the full conference fee schedule

Registration: please apply using the downloadable registration form

For further information and pre-registration enquiries please email: infostudies-conferences@ucl.ac.uk


Programme

DAY ONE: THURSDAY 25 JUNE

09-30 Registration and Coffee

10-00 Welcome and introduction to the conference by the chair and organiser Anthony Watkinson (Senior Lecturer, Centre for Publishing, University College London)

10-15 to 13-00 SESSION ONE: WHAT RESEARCH TELLS US 1
The purpose of this session and the one beginning the Friday proceedings is to seek insights from major producers of research and funders of research who have something to say on the theme of the conference.

10-15 to 11-00 Professor Michael Mabe, Chief Executive Officer of the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers and Visiting Professor University College London Centre for Publishing.
Professor Mabe will set the scene with an examination of the continuing role of the journal, and in particular the journal article, and trends that may lead to changes in existing structures of formal publication.

11-00 to 11-45 Professor Carol Tenopir, Director of the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee
Professor Tenopir will bring to bear on the questions posed her understanding, based on several decades of research including some recent and as yet unpublished results on the way in which scholars use the literature.

11-45 to 12-30 Dr. Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, University of Bath
UKOLN is a reseach organisation that hopes to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of digital libraries and information systems. Dr. Lyon will present a different perspective drawn from her research for JISC and other organisations

12-30 to 13-00 Questions for the session one speakers and general discussion about themes raised.

13-00 to 14-00 Lunch

14-00 to 17-30 SESSION TWO: INDICATIONS FROM EXPERIENCE
This session will collect together shorter presentations. Some will provide concrete examples of experiments in new forms of publication and what the take-up of these experiments can indicate about new forms of communication. Others will provide the fruit of reflections based on innovation in new publishing programmes. Others will be presentations on specialist research relevant to the theme.

14-00 to 14-30 Dr. Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science
PLoS have experimented in journal publishing with the successful launch of PLoS ONE. Dr. Patterson will discuss what PLoS have learnt and suggest other new approaches they are considering.

14-30 to 15-00 Judith Winters, Editor of Internet Archaeology at the University of York.
Internet Archaeology is a pioneering publication which has from its inception (1996) used the capabilities and functionality of the web (VR, databases, interactive mapping, video) and has been organised to take into account the way that the archaeological community wants to present their research. Judith will talk about the publication needs of archaeologists and the journal's development, and will explain the enterprising LEAP project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.

15-00 to 15-30 Dr. Hans Pfeiffenberger, Editor of Earth System Science Data at the Alfred-Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven
ESSD is a unique journal which is pioneering a new approach to using a formal publication to encourage the *sharing* of data in the earth sciences. In particular, the journal is applying classical peer review to the datasets covered by its articles. Dr. Pfeiffenberger will explain a problem that is impacting on the efficient transfer of knowledge in all disciplines and speak about what he has learnt so far and describe his plans for the future.

15-30 to 16-00 Refreshment Break

16-00 to 16-30 Toby Green, Head of Publishing, Public Affairs and Communications Directorate, OECD Paris
The work of OECD’s publication division is well known for using the resources of the Web to make the product of their in-house research and data gathering more useful to their many different types of users. Mr. Green will use his experience to reflect on the themes of the conference, the impact online publishing has had on the way authors prepare their manuscripts and specifically showcase several new developments in publishing datasets alongside books including their new visualisation-based publication, Regions at a Glance.

16-30 to 17-00 Isabel Galina, Teaching Fellow, Department of Information Studies at University College London
Ms Galina has recently completed an important piece of research on informal e-publishing with special reference to the role of repositories. She will explore the relevance of her conclusions to the theme of the conference.

17-00 to 17-30 Deborah Kahn, Publishing Director, BiomedCentral
BMC is a commercial publisher which has thrived using a new business model but within the company there has always been serious discussion about innovation in other ways, some of which has been implemented. Ms Kahn will draw upon insights gained by BMC and internal plans to address the concerns of the conference

17-30 to 18-00 Questions for the session two speakers and general discussion about themes raised.

18-00 to 19-30 Drinks Reception for all speakers and registrants on either day


DAY TWO: FRIDAY 26 JUNE

09-00 Registration and Coffee

09-30 to 11-00 SESSION THREE: WHAT RESEARCH TELLS US 2
Session three will complete the series of larger presentations begun yesterday morning with two major contributions bringing serious research to bear on practical publishing

9-30 to 10-15 Professor David Nicholas}, Head of the Department of Information Studies, UCL and Director of CIBER
CIBER research, specifically the Virtual Scholar programme, has concentrated on the online use of e-publications by scholars, originally on the use of journals but now increasingly on the growing e-book resources. Professor Nicholas will describe how knowledge gained from this research relates to the conference themes

10-15 to 11-00 Dr Michael Jubb, Director of the Research Information Network
RIN has been responsible for commissioning over the last few years major pieces of research on scholarly communication. Dr. Jubb will concentrate in his presentation on new studies on the take up (or not) by researchers' of social networking and related services, and a set of case studies of how researchers in the life sciences discover, create, use, manage and disseminate information resources in the course of their research.

11-00 to 11-30 Questions for the session three speakers and general discussion about themes raised so far

11-30 to 12-00 Refreshment break

12-00 to 12-45 and 13-45 to 15-45 SESSION FOUR: VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

12-00 to 12-45 Dr.Ijsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation for Journals Publishing Elsevier
Dr. Aalbersberg heads a unit exploring possibilities for content innovation at the largest scholarly publisher. He will provide a vision that he and his group are developing.

12-45 to 13-45 Lunch

13-45 to 14-30 Dr. Stefan Gradmann, Professor of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University, Berlin
Professor Gradmann will start from first principles, the needs of the scholarly communication process, and not from within the information chain is it is currently. Professor Gradmann comes from a library background and will concentrate on scholarly communication in the social sciences and the humanities.

14-30 to 15-15 Dr. Joost Kircz, Professor of Electronic Publishing at the University for Applied Sciences, Amsterdam
Professor Kircz worked for sixteen years in publishing following an academic background in molecular physics. His interest in and research on scholarly communication, in particular science journals, has attracted wide interest over a number of years

15-15 to 15-45 Questions for the session four speakers and general discussion of themes raised by them

15-45 to 16-15 Refreshments

16-15 to 17-30 Panel chaired by Dr. Tula Giannini, Dean and Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Library and Information Science, New York.
The plan for the panel is to provide some broad insights, based in part on the conference, including contributions from the floor and try to come to some conclusions about the forms of formal scholarly communication can and might change to take greater advantage of the opportunities presented by the digital environment and the changing work patterns of scholars.
The panellists are Professor Derek Law, formerly Head of the Information Resources Directorate and University Librarian at the University of Strathclyde, and Mr. Jerry Cowhig, Managing Director of Institute of Physics Publishing and (until 2009) chair of the board of STM. Both Dr. Law and Mr. Cowhig are noted for the fresh perspectives they bring to any subject including scholarly communication. They will both be attending the whole conference. They will be joined by the Conference Organiser, Anthony Watkinson.
Dr. Giannini will introduce the panel and she and the three panellists will provide short and provocative introductions with a view to eliciting general discussion

17-30 Conclusion of conference