The article is E Is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [E]Journal by Gerry McKiernan The Serials Librarian, 1541-1095, Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 293 – 321.

McKiernan has very generously, helpfully self-archived the piece here.

There are several reasons I want to write about McKiernan’s piece.

First of all, the article is an excellent overview of what publishing an article in a scholarly journal has entailed over the years, how things stood in 2002 and how things were progressing back then.  I wish I had been assigned this article in library school and recommend it to library science instructors.

I was particularly struck by the wording, “…the journal is one large object made up of article objects, individual request objects, a server object, solution objects, page objects, and reference objects, and other objects that interact with each other, the network and the hardware environment to create the journal that is delivered to each reader…In this model, the reader is considered an object that dynamically participates in the creation of the journal.”

Pretty prescient of McKiernan and the authors he cites, End-User Customized Chemistry Journal Articles Steven M. Bachrach,* Anatoli Krassavine, and Darin C. Burleigh J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1999, 39 (1), pp 81–8.

I had not heard of Steven Bachrach before and it really is fascinating how much of the work in leveraging the power of the Web for Science 2.0 is being done not by info professionals but by chemists such as Bachrach, Jean-Claude Bradley, and Antony Williams.

Librarians and information scientists are major beneficiaries of the work the chemists and other basic scientists are doing vis-à-vis transforming the very basics of how science is done and what forms scientific communication and scholarly publishing are taking.

Thank you, Gerry McKiernan, for instance, for introducing those of who live in the world of librarianship and the info sciences to the quite brilliant Dr. Bachrach who seems to have no trouble excelling in his field of chemistry while in his off hours helping to transform the very basis of the cornerstones of the edifice of scientific communication: the journal and the article. Kind of depressing, really, what people like Bachrach, Williams and Bradley accomplish in so many fields while the rest of us struggle along trying to do even one or two fairly useful things in our own, less impressive grooves!

The second reason I wanted to highlight McKiernan’s article is that it is an excellent example of the value of self-archiving as a way of sharing one’s scholarly production with greater audiences than may be subscribers of a particular journal. Thanks to McKiernan’s proactive actions of a) self-archiving his article so that it is easily accessible as a PDF to all comers and b) alerting various audiences to his article with a link on where to find it more of us can learn about important topics.

For instance, I noticed a message from McKiernan himself in one of the electronic discussion lists of The American Society for Information Science & Technology ASIS&T: a good lesson on the merits of unabashed marketing of one’s work. I wish more librarians would do the same—don’t be shy, group! More of us should request from scholarly publishers (and this goes for everyone—scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the sciences, etc.) the right to self-archive or deposit our work in institutional repositories.

And this brings me another reason I want to highlight McKiernan’s act of self-archiving. It is actually to the benefit of the journal and thus to the publisher of it.

For instance, I am not a serials librarian but I am now interested in the journal in which McKiernan’s article first appeared and have been perusing the web site of the journal, The Serials Librarian and almost certainly would not now be considering subscribing had I not been able to download and read McKiernan’s article and to think, “Hmm, I am not a serials librarian. But this is a pretty thought-provoking article. I wonder what else is in that journal…”

And I came across some quite interesting stuff in the abstracts, like this one about the article, “What Color is Your Paratext?” and was edified there to read this quite interesting passage:

Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to the trustworthiness of information. In the context of the Internet, Bilder suggested creating a meta-brand to serve as paratext. CrossRef is developing a meta-brand called CrossMark that would certify for the reader that the online content to which it is attached has been vetted by processes of scholarly review and is therefore trustworthy.

That snippet made me think, “How sloppy of me to have gotten all the way through library school just a year ago and not really to have grasped what CrossRef is.”

Therefore, I checked out what it is exactly.

This is a rather long-winded (but you are all used to that with me, no?) way of saying that allowing for self-archiving is good for readers, authors who want to be read and the journals that allow for it. It also shows that journals can be quite effectively promoted by the generosity of the editors who allow people like McKiernan to self-archive. Good for Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Informa (so many imprints these days!) for allowing me to get a look via McKiernan’s article for free of what kinds of things appear in The Serials Librarian and thereby better gauge the value of a paid subscription to it. Clever of them! And, by the way, kudos to Iowa State University Library for sharing the esteemed McKiernan with the wider world of library and information science.

This is all quite fascinating for those interested in how publishers are faring in a rapidly changing online world in which both the public and policymakers are scrutinizing the existing cozy, rigid realm of sci/tech and medical publishing and not liking what they see.

I have written about DeepDyve’s innovative “Research. Rent. Read.” model before and have since then chatted on the phone with DeepDyve’s CEO, William Park. I had been planning to write about DeepDyve’s interesting alliance with CiteULike but wanted to first attend ScienceOnline2010 because I knew that there was to be a session there called, “Online Reference Managers”
and that one of the firms to be discussed at it was to be CiteULike.

And here I am going to digress into matters of nomenclature. CiteULike itself uses the wording, “free service for managing and discovering scholarly references” and “scholarly bookmarking services,” whereas at ScienceOnline2010 we saw the wording, “Reference managers, sometimes called citation managers or bibliography managers, help you keep, organize, and re-use citation information.”

Soooo, take your pick. I think I am going to stick with social bookmarking as that seems the most common term, and it is easier for me to type the word “social” than the word “scholarly.”

In any case, I am glad that I attended that session at ScienceOnline (and if I were a vendor or startup that had anything to do with software in the sciences I would send a huge contingent to next year’s conference, as there will be many opportunities there to get a feel for products that the online science community needs) because it gave me a better handle on social bookmarking in the sciences. Oh, rats—maybe I should have stuck with the term scholarly bookmarking. So many words for the same thing.

I am actually somewhat grateful for my sloth since then and for not having written about the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance (which is not a partnership per se, as far as I can tell) because there have been several developments at DeepDyve in the interval that I can now discuss in this one post, having finally roused myself to a state of modest activity.

Let us first examine what makes the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance interesting and what might enable the two firms to actually make some money from it.

Here are the pros at this stage as I see them.

First of all, Mr. Park has long argued that there is a substantial pool of researchers (and I would argue a vast unrecognized group of laypeople who have a driving interest in a scientific subject whether as a hobby or because they are activists on an environmental issue, say, or are afflicted by or love someone with a dire illness) who have need of scholarly articles but who have no access to resource-rich libraries and so have to either pay whopping sums (say $35 a pop for maybe seven pages of text), prevail on the good will of those who do have access to such resources (and those so beseeched may feel uneasy about complying with such supplications given how confusing and occasionally draconian copyright rules are on sharing scholarly articles) or do without the information.

DeepDyve’s pitch to publishers is that this is a huge market and that sci/tech publishers (many of which are professional societies that make money from their publishing operations and which have simply ignored non-members or disdained them as dilettantes or ignoramuses unworthy of attention) are better off trying to entice them by risking peeks at articles online for 99 cents in the hopes that the lurker will so like what he sees via his non-reproducible, non-downloadable peek that he will pony up for the actual PDF or otherwise downloadable version.

The trick for both CiteULike and DeepDyve is to persuade the publishers that they are better off trying the 99 cent peek gambit than to remain aloof from this group and continue their present ways of making money: squeezing libraries until the pips squeak (not a sustainable strategy given cost pressures in academia at even the richest of institutions, let alone cash-strapped ones), charging ever more for personal subscriptions, and assuming that the general public is willing to continue forking over $20-45 for articles when they are becoming aware of the Open Access movement. This awareness and concomitant disgruntlement are fueling the drive for public access to taxpayer-funded research. In the current anti-corporate, tar and feather the price gougers public mood DeepDyve could actually provide some cover and heretofore untapped revenue streams for the publishers willing to partner with DeepDyve (and DeepDyve is making major strides there—more on that below).

Let us stick with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance for the moment. Another plus for the publishers that they should take note of is its potential as a way of advertising the existence of its offerings to educated (who also tend to be affluent ones) readers.

For instance, if you do a search in CiteULike you often will come up with journals you had not heard of before. Now, if I could take a series of 99-cent peeks at various articles in a periodical without even getting up my from desk (as opposed to, say, emailing asking for a free sample copy which I may or may not be granted and which may take weeks to arrive in hard copy and which may be several years old and thus not good advertising of the value of the journal) I might be impressed enough to subscribe to the journal itself or simply go ahead and purchase the full text of several articles.

The risk for the publishers, of course, is that I will do nothing but peek, get the gist and never do much more than that. But at least they would have gotten maybe $5 out of me that day, which is better than nothing.

Another plus for the publishers of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is that as more and more libraries cut back on journal subscriptions even researchers that are affiliated with universities will find that they can’t get what they need from their own institutions and may start using the 99-cent peek and either download the full article (a win for the publisher) or try to get the full article via their library’s interlibrary loan service (which is still a win for the publisher in that some interest has been generated in the journal, which means some library somewhere will continue subscribing to it).

A minus for the publisher of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is the rather inert state of scholarly bookmarking services (and spam problems at Connotea, for instance), so whether they would truly get much business from hooking up with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance is another question. (For instance, I just tried out CiteULike again for really the first major go at it since I set up my account way back in 2005—but then I am not a heavy duty scholar).

Likewise, for CiteULike the value of the relationship with DeepDyve can be realized only if DeepDyve can demonstrate that it has many big-name publishers on board.

For example, I tried a search just now in CiteULike on my usual search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Because DeepDyve has no relationships with publishers that feature the huge number of journals in the neurological sciences that, say Springer (which, as the sponsor of CiteULike, you would think would come on board with the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance) or Elsevier do, I saw not a single icon for the 99-cent peek.

But the fact that I could not see the icon for my search is really an argument for the value of the CiteULike-DeepDyve alliance to publishers. I mean here I was, doing a search. My debit card is in the room. I could easily have ordered several articles if I had had immediate access to a peek and possibly sizable sums of money could have been extracted from me just now.

Think about that scenario, publishers. Do you really want me to have to try to find your stuff in Google or hope that I know enough to use PubMed and get to your toll access sites from there and then hope that I will simply hand over $35 or so without a peek or peep?

And DeepDyve is starting to forge a pretty impressive roster of blue ribbon publishers among its offerings and is approaching critical mass in terms of raising the comfort level among prestige publishers with its “Research. Rent. Read.” model. It now has relationships with major scholarly publishers such as the MIT Press, and the University of California Press, and with professional societies like the American Institute of Physics, the Radiological Society of North America, and the Association for Computing Machinery. Not bad.

I am quite puzzled, actually, as to why this quite interesting company is not getting the attention it merits in the library and scholarly publishing blogosphere. Perhaps librarians aren’t writing about it because they can usually, via professional networks and personal relationships, get their patrons what they need. Open Access people are not writing about it because they are philosophically opposed to cash changing hands when it comes to research information.

But let’s talk ugly truths here. We are not in a world where everyone has access to library resources galore. And not everything is Open Access yet. There are large numbers of people who need scholarly information and should have an affordable option for getting it and publishers should be aware that there are ways to make some money is some instances rather than none in many and that 99-cent peeks can lead to years of individual subscriptions.

William Park is an endlessly creative thinker. DeepDyve started off a nice little search engine. That in itself was interesting and worthwhile. He is now creating new models for the entire sci/tech publishing industry and making what had been a rather tired Web tool (social bookmarking) interesting again. Gotta hand it to the guy–there are second acts in American life.