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Towards Open Scientific Publishing - the SciX Project

By Ziga Turk, Bo-Christer Björk and Bob Martens - July 2002

Ziga Turk, Bo-Christer Björk and Bob Martens provide a very telling insight into current practices in the relationship between publicly funded researchers and the commercial scientific publishing industry. They see the existing situation as quite unsatisfactory and an obstacle to the efficient exchange of research information and hence scientific progress. They explain for us how the SciX Project intends to redress, what appears to them, to be a very unacceptable state of affairs.

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Figure 1: Cover page of the Philosophical Transactions

Introduction

The history of scientific publishing starts in the 17th Century when the Royal Society created the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [1]. The intention was to create a public registry of ideas - a logbook or journal - of the "present undertakings, studies and labours of the ingenious" who thought of what first - to protect intellectual property and ensure the rapid evolution of scientific knowledge (Fig. 1). For a long time, scientific publishing remained largely in the hands of learned societies and similar scientist-driven institutions. Publishers have been entering the market since the mid-19th Century, but their role was marginal and profits negligible until the 1960's, when the Science Citation Index [2] was introduced and the number of Universities around the developed world grew quickly. "What librarians (of these Universities) viewed as crucial core journals, publishers translated as the constitutive elements of an "inelastic market", i.e. a market where demand was little affected by pricing (and vice versa)" [1].

The business model of publishers is a fascinating one. The scientists do the research, they write the papers, they review their peers' work and they edit the scientific journals. They give away the copyright to their work, for free, to a party that has not been taking part in the value chain before. They then subscribe to, usually, rather expensive journals, so that they can learn about the work of their peers. In the SciX project we believe that giving away the right to copy (copyright) and distribute results of scientific work hinders the efficient exchange of information and makes scientific results harder and more expensive to obtain.

This belief is the baseline of the SciX project [3]. SciX (Open, self-managed platform for scientific information exchange - IST - 2001 - 33127) is a 24-month project with EU funding of Euros 1,000,000. Co-ordinated by the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), the partners include Swedish Business School of Finland, Icelandic Building Research Institute, an eBusiness company Indra/Atlante (Spain), Technical University of Vienna (Austria), FGG Institute (Slovenia) and the University of Salford (UK).

Previous work

The partners have been active in the field of electronic publishing since the mid-1990's. Bo-Christer Björk and Ziga Turk have been the editor and one of the co-editors of the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction [4]. The average time from submission of a paper to its publication has been around 6 months. With each paper published there were on average about 1,000 readers who viewed the abstract and about 1,400 who downloaded the full text.

Since 1999, Bob Martens and Ziga Turk have been managing CUMINCAD - the Cumulative index of CAD [5] - the largest freely available database of papers related to computer aided architectural design (CAAD), particularly related to education in this area. At conferences organised by regional organisations of CAAD teachers (ECAADE in Europe, ACADIA in North America, Sigradi in South America and CAADRIA in Australasia) thousands of papers have been published. Rarely were the proceedings published by a professional publisher. Therefore the texts were not entered into commercial indexes and neither were they sold commercially. The full texts were not broadly available; only conference attendees had copies. On the other hand, the professional organisations retained the copyright to this work and could therefore allow its publication/archiving in the CUMINCAD. Accordingly this work is available on the Internet and rescued from oblivion. At the time of writing, CUMINCAD comprises 3,831 papers with abstracts. 883 papers are also available in full text.

Figure 2: User interface of the CUMINCAD database

Figure 3: CUMINCAD database search results page

Related work - Commercial

Both professional organisations and groups of publishers, as well as specialised companies, are providing added value services related to scientific publishing. One example, amongst others, is the CIB's database ICONDA. Several bibliographical databases provide sophisticated search engines on bibliographic information about publications, (furnishing details such as titles and abstracts). Full texts are, as a rule, not available.

The Internet represents a threat to traditional publishers. While some years ago, the Internet was a first resource for obtaining scientific information [6], today it is becoming the only resource, particularly with young researchers. Traditional publishers are responding with services such as ScienceDirect which allows pay-on-demand access to the full texts of published papers.

Another strategy of publishers is to avoid dealing directly with the readers of journals and attempting to negotiate direct, long-term deals with either whole universities [7], or whole countries [8]. Although discounts are offered if an institution subscribes to a full spectrum of journals, the economies of such deals for the funding bodies and the researchers are not necessarily positive.

Related work in free publishing

The idea to use the Internet for scientific publication is not new. Existing solutions are of the following types:

• Preprint archives offer drafts of papers that have been submitted to publication in paper-based journals. No quality control is provided. Often, the papers are quite similar to the final works published. Perhaps the best known such archive is the Los Alamos or arXiv preprints archive [9]
• Electronic journals (eJournals) and magazines (eZines). Similar to ITcon they provide similar quality control mechanisms as paper based publications. 400 such journals were believed to exist in 1999, including a Journal on Electronic Publishing. Today this number is estimated at over 1,000.
• On-line bibliographies are subject-based collections of papers (usually without full text). An example from a related domain to W78's is the ARCOM collection of abstracts from construction management and economics [10]. Having been published as a booklet for a number of years, the abstracts are currently freely available through a database on the Web. Another well known example is the CiteSeer service offering full texts of some 2.5 million papers related to computer science. CiteSeer is accumulating the papers from the Web and copying them from authors' websites to one central location where they are classified, indexed and cross-referenced.

Problems with these services include:

• Sustainability. Although the funds required to run such services are quite small, once the initial work has been done by the enthusiasts, stable funding is required. The mortality rate of electronic journals was found to be 25% over two years [11]
• - Copyright. Many services include material that has been previously published in a way that required the transfer of the copyright
• - Prestige. An important factor in deciding where to publish is the prestige of a journal [6], as perceived by the universities' or national research review processes. It is not uncommon that a publication in a fully reviewed electronic journal is seen as less valuable than publication at a conference where authors actually paid a fee to get their work published in impressive hard-bound copies of the conference proceedings.

Exemplars in the field of software

The policy of the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the NSF (National Science Foundation) in the United States was that all research that was funded through public funding should make the results available for free. This has not been entirely true of published papers, but has worked excellently with software. Programs written in the context of research projects were made available - for free, usually including source code - on the Internet. In fact, the software to run the Internet in the first place was available for free. This created the critical mass for the so-called open-source initiative [12]. An increasing number of operating systems, application programs and tools are available free. Market share of those systems is growing and they are being used as a platform for vertical applications by companies such as IBM.

On the other hand, the European-funded research projects (such as the 4th and 5th Framework projects) have never required that results be made publicly available. The excuse offered was that commercial companies are co-funding this work and that they are not interested in making available what could be their competitive advantage. We are not aware of the scientific community challenging this system. Labelling most of the reports "restricted" actually restricted the readership to the project officers and the reviewers.

Exemplars in the field of standards

Standards organizations, in common with journal publishers, do not fund the writing of new standards, yet they are given the copyright of a standard. They support their organisational activities by the sale of the paper copies of those standards. Several research efforts addressing the computerisation of building codes stopped at a prototype level, because of problems with the copyright to the text of the standard.

The standards that govern the Internet and the Web serve as something of contrast. The well known "request for comments" documents (RFC's) are the result of the work of groups of individuals and are made available, for free, on the Internet, to be commented on as well as for writing compatible software. One may recall that in the early 1990's there was direct competition between ISO- and Internet-based networking, best exemplified by the use of two different email addressing schemes. The Internet solution, based on open freely accessible standard RFC822, prevailed.

The development of product modelling standards also started with the restricted publication model. Only recently has the IAI (Industry Alliance for Interoperability) corrected this mistake and is making the entire IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) standard available on the Internet for free.

The Open Archives Initiative

In the paper-based publishing, a few dozens publishers control most scientific publications. Making a reasonably complete index involves including the publications of those few largest publishing organisations. If, however, thousands of people start creating digital archives on the Internet, indexing that information could be quite challenging. Web search engines, such as Google or Altavista are not very appropriate tools for searching for scientific information, because they index everything indiscriminately.

The Open Archives Initiative [13] is standardising the metadata structure and the API of an archive, so that the archive can be indexed and so ensure that several archives can be searched by users at the same time. Moreover, Open Archives Initiative is developing standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.

The Goals of the SciX Project

The objective of this project is to demonstrate

1. that the scientific knowledge management can be made much more efficient
2. show alternative business models to those practised in the past
3. analyse social, economic, legal and other related issues

2-4% of European GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is spent on research and development - on creating new knowledge. While several projects deal with the management of knowledge that is created within industry, little has changed in the past hundred years in the ways that knowledge, created by scientific research and published in scientific journals, is handled. The current mainstream scientific publication process has so far been only marginally affected by the possibilities offered by the Internet, despite some pioneering endeavours. This is not so much because of lack of enthusiasm, but because there is a lack of sound business models and pilots to demonstrate the benefits of totally free scientific archives to the organisations, which, ultimately, should be funding their development and maintenance.

The objectives of the Project are:

• to enable scientists time- and cost-efficient access to their peers' work by creating a repository of electronic publications
• - to make the scientific materials in the repository also available to non-scientists - engineers, architects from industry and explore new business scenarios
• - to support building a virtual on-line community of authors and readers

To achieve these objectives SciX will:

• create the necessary services infrastructure and populate it with at least 5,000 papers from the domain of architecture and engineering
• - strengthen the existing transition to new modes of scientific publishing so that the more cost-effective channels for dissemination over the Internet are put to efficient use; we will do so by providing an infrastructure to set up an electronic journal and make it available under open source licensing
• perform a socio-economic analysis of new business
• investigate the legal, social and psychological obstacles to using eWork approaches in this area; this will include a survey among about 300 of our colleagues on their views on e-publishing
• develop a method to benchmark scientific journals based on user requirements in the Internet era.

Most technologies and software to implement these goals are either freely available or have even been developed by the partners in this project in the past. See section "Previous work".

Enable efficient access to scientific results

The main problem in a new vision of information exchange in science is the copyright that researchers currently give away to the commercial publishers for free, and which results in severe obstacles for potential readers in retrieving the information they need. There are also other barriers to a shift to free repositories such as addressing the perceived risks of Internet publishing, the sluggishness of academic departments in changing their "rating" systems, etc., all which need to be studied. A survey we conducted in the year 2000 in the field of construction IT and management showed interesting results in relation to what scientists think about where to publish and what to read. We intend to continue this survey over the next years so that the trends can be monitored as well as gauging the impact of the proposed repository.

Develop benchmarking methods for scientific journals

Typically scientific journals have been rated by prestige, often based on subjective evaluations or, to some extent, on the use of citation indexes. Ratings have been done implicitly through university departments, for instance in shortlists of accepted publications for promotion etc. Little attention has been paid to questions of how quickly and efficiently the information passes to experts for whom the information could be useful. Thus it would be very beneficial to develop methods which would allow the benchmarking of journals for factors other than the scientific quality of papers (e.g. turnaround time from submission to publication, availability, readership etc.). Such a benchmarking tool will be developed in the project and tested with a number of journals from different categories. The main value of such a tool would be as a means to increasing the awareness within scientific communities of the deficiencies of their current communication process. It is to be hoped such awareness will trigger action towards altering the process.

The demonstrator

The main components of the demonstrator comprise:

• a digital library
• an electronic journal infrastructure
• support for a workshop or a conference infrastructure

Open source solutions and/or rentable Web infrastructure will be created and made available to potential users. Compatibility with emerging standards, such as Open archives, will be incorporated.

Current work

The SciX project started in February 2002. Current work includes the analysis of user requirements , design of the overall architecture and the business process modeling of the as-is situation. First deliverables are due in September 2002.

Acknowledgement and disclaimer

This article appears under the auspices of the SciX Project [3], funded by the European Commission under contract IST - 2001 - 33127. The contribution of the funding agency as well as that of industrial partners in the project is gratefully acknowledged.

The opinions expressed in this paper are that of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of their employers, of the SciX consortium or of the European Commission.

References

1. Guedon, J.C. (2001). In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing, proceedings, Association of Research Libraries, Proceedings of the 138th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, May 2001
   URL: < http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html>
2. ISI Web Site,
   URL: <http://www.isinet.com/>
3. SciX Project
   URL: <http://www.SciX.net/>
4. Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction
   URL: <http://www.ITcon.org/>
5. CumInCAD Web Site,
   URL: <http://cumincad.scix.net/>
6. Björk, B-C., Turk, Z. (2000). How Scientists Retrieve Publications: An Empirical Study of How the Internet Is Overtaking Paper Media, Journal of Electronic Publishing, Michigan University Press, Vol. 6/2. 2000
   URL: <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/bjork.html>
7. Landesman, M., Van Reenen, J. (2000). Consortia vs. Reform - Creating Congruence, Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol 6/2,
   URL: <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/landesman.html>
8. Tämä on FinELib
   URL: <http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/finelib/>
9. arXiv.org e-Print archive
   URL: <http://www.arxiv.org/>
10. ARCOM Construction Management Abstracts
    URL: <http://www2.auckland.ac.nz/lbr/prop/propres.htm#ARCOM>
11. Wells, A. (1999). Exploring the development of the independent, electronic, scholarly journal,M.Sc. in Information Management, Electronic Dissertations Library, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK,
    URL: <http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/elecdiss/edl0001/index.html>
12. Open Source Initiative
    URL: <http://www.opensource.org/>
13. Open Archives Initiative
    URL: <http://www.openarchives.org/>

Author Details

Ziga Turk
University of Ljubljana
FGG-IKPIR
Jamova 2
1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia

URL: <http://itc.fgg.uni-lj.si/zturk/
Email: ziga.turk@itc.fgg.uni-lj.si

Ziga Turk (b.1962) is an associate professor of construction informatics at the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineeing at the University of Ljubljana. He has degrees in Computer Science and Civil Engineering and works mainly in the filed of construction informatics where he published numerous journal and conference papers. He has been involved with Web publishing since 1993. His works are available from his Web page.

Bo-Christer Björk
Professor
Information Systems Science
The Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

URL: <http://www.wasa.shh.fi/
Email: Bo-Christer.Bjork@shh.fi

Bo-Christer Björk (b. 1952) is Professor of Information Systems Science at the Swedish school of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki, Finland. He holds degrees from three universities. Prior to his current appointment he spent seven years as professor of Information Technology in Construction at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, a peer reviewed scholarly journal which has appeared for free on the WWW since 1996.

Bob Martens
Institut für Örtliche Raumplanung
TU Wien
Karlsplatz 13
A-1040 Wien
Austria

Email: b.martens@tuwien.ac.at

Bob Martens (b.1961) holds an M.Sc. in Architecture from Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) and Dr. Techn. from Vienna University of Technology. He is appointed as an associate professor for Spatial Simulation and Interior Design in Vienna and guest professor for Simulation Techniques at Graz University of Technology. His main research topic is focussing on Simulation-Aided Architectural Design (SAAD) including full-scale and virtual modelling techniques as well as applied communication technology.

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For citation purposes:
Turk,Z, Björk, B-C., and Martens, B. "Towards Open Scientific Publishing - the SciX Project", Cultivate Interactive, issue 7, 11 July 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/scix/>

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