Notes from Discussion Groups: Objective 7. Operate an electronic publishing program capable of systematic production and distribution of journals, monographs, and multimedia compositions and foster alternatives to conventional publishing .
Group #2882
Facilitator: Bob Kibbe
Note-taker: Thad Dickinson
LMT: Jean Poland, Sarah Thomas
Attending: Teresa Ehling, Debra Federation, David Fielding, Michael Fromerth, Diane Hillman, Nancy Holcomb, Sarah How, Keith Jenkins, George Kozak, LeRoy LaFleur, Xin Lin, Fiona Patrick, Steven Rockey, Kizer Walker, Scott Wicks
The objective
- Hope to expand on the Euclid model
- Make DPubs an open source system
- Tools that support open access
- Attain sustainability
Discussion:
- Sustainability
- What about experiments in publishing that are not in the sciences? Will there be more incorporation of the visual or the humanities?
- I don’t see the non-sciences folded into this objective
- Yes, it is possible [to incorporate the subjects other than the sciences] and hopefully we will accommodate a variety of subject types.
- Technology exists to make it feasible to bring in other fields.
- Interested in brand new content-types; don’t think we need to be competing with other publishers
- Lab of Ornithology is missing from this list: learning from what they are doing would be helpful.
- We need to convince people that there is something positive to gain by participating (DSpace being an example)
- Sustainability will require larger buy-in by the academic community
- There is a problem of getting decent metadata and finding ways of evaluating and managing metadata is critical.
- Considering all that we are doing now, what are our weaknesses? What problems have to be overcome to make it possible?
- We must market more, often to publishers as well as to peers
- We need generalized support without having to outsource
- We need to dovetail our initial initiatives; we are trying to reach out in many directions and we need to coordinate the outreach; need more carrots, such as faculty grants, to bring others in with us.
- We need to think on a more community-based level, with Cornell being the community; first, build a community that will want to use it.
- We need to develop a reputation, a brand, a way of getting people interested
- An effort needs to be made to give ourselves some prestige [in this area]
- First movement advantage is critical.
- It’s important to respond to a particular subject need: ArXiv didn’t create the community, the community created ArXiv.
- If you rely on submitters to provide the metadata, there will be inconsistencies.
- Why are we not collaborating with the Johnson School of Management students and faculty for marketing?
- They could help with brand management and marketing
- Free and better that hiring consultant
Implementation
- Is this a move from projects to a program? How do you as an institution move from projects to program?
- If we’re serious [about a program] we need to look at all projects and smooth those out; right now there are too many pieces outside the box to market effectively.
- This is an opportunity to de-construct scholarly publishing and other existing models.
- We need to describe this in a clear enough way so that people on all levels have something to hold on to.
- There must be open-responsiveness.
- We should identify what we do really well that publishers aren’t doing, and explain that.
- There needs to be a mechanism for us to harvest what we are doing now; cherry picking.
- There should be a “Cornell container” to “put” projects into.
- There needs to be functional groups available to determine what, if anything, the projects have in common
- Must ask ourselves, “Are we meeting the need?” What do faculty really want? Opportunities exist for educating faculty to get them actually thinking about their scholarly output.
- We could use the Indonesia project as an example of collaboration.
- Perhaps we should be building “referitories” instead of repositories.
Potential partners
- We are in competition with HighWire and Ingenta
- Perhaps we should work on a model of “cooperation” instead of competition.
- CDL (California Digital Library), Columbia, and Michigan all have digital initiatives