Abstracts
of talks at the colloquium on the
Future Professional Communication in Astronomy
(Brussels,
10-13 June 2007)
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Changing
Sources for Research Literature
(Helmut
A. Abt, KPNO)
Including
material published previously, I considered all the references listed in the
January issues of Astronomy &
Astrophysics and the Astrophysical
Journal in decade intervals from 1952 to 2006. The results are that journal papers,
preprints, and reviews are growing in the frequency in which they are cited,
while observatory publications, private communications, theses, conference
papers, and monographs are decreasing in cited frequency. The last is surprising in view of the rapidly
increasing numbers of conferences and monographs published annually.
It appears
that sources of information that are readily available on-line are greatly
preferred over sources that are not available on the internet.
Plethoric
Prose versus Salient Points
(Rudi
Albrecht, ST-ECF)
Observation:
- Finding
(all) relevant information in the large volume of scientific literature is
difficult
-
Traditional publishing methods prevail for various reasons
- The human
brain is the bottleneck of information processing
Assertion:
- The
technology to solve the above problems already exists
Conclusion:
- Identify
publication and knowledge processing requirements, explore the relevant
technology, and implement a pilot project
Publishing
in the Next Five Years: A Commercial Publisher's Perspective
(Harry
Blom, Springer)
Over the
past decade, Internet technology changed the ways of publishing tremendously.
It is truly revolutionary that both fresh and historic science publications are
so much easier to search and find. This revolution has not been completed and
all parties involved in science publishing are continuously adjusting their
activities to the new rules and opportunities. From a commercial publisher's
perspective, I will extrapolate what happens today to predict what happens in
the next 5 years with journal subscriptions, book publishing, marketing,
production and other steps in the publishing process.
Some
Publishing Statistics on the Astrophysical Journal and Sister Journals in the
Period 1990-2006
(W.
Butler Burton, ApJ)
I discuss
some statistics and trends of papers published since 1990 in The Astrophysical
Journal, and make comparisons of the ApJ situation with those of the AJ, the
MNRAS, and A&A. For these journals,
the number of papers published per year has increased linearly since 1990,
approximately doubling. The average
number of authors per paper has increased more strongly than the number of
papers. The average paper length has
remained constant, so that the "effective contribution per author per
paper" has decreased regularly. The
percentage of single-author papers continues to decrease monotonically; such
papers are now a rarity. The frequency
distribution of number of pages per paper in the principal journals is quite
similar, and is thus evidently not governed by page-charge issues. Very long papers appear with about the same
frequency in each of the journals; thus the nominal page-length limit imposed
by the ApJ has little effect. The
consistency of the patterns and trends across the principal journals suggests
that customs or habits amongst astronomers play an important role, and that the
editorial policies of the journals cause little differentiation.
Elsevier'
Views on Future Professional Publishing
(David
Clark, Elsevier)
[tbp]
Future
Professional Communication in Astronomy: Questions and Challenges
(André
Heck, Strasbourg Obs.)
Fifteen
years after the first international meeting on electronic publishing
(Strasbourg, October 1991) from which originated many of today's
materializations and collaborations in the field, where do we stand? Electronic
mailings and web postings have profoundly changed the way our community works
and communicates, but when the time comes to publish refereed documents, we are
still mainly producing electronic versions of documents printable or otherwise
available on paper instead of practising full electronic publishing. Why is
that? While maintaining a diversity of media is certainly desirable, are there
technical barriers (for instance at the level of archiving) to going fully
electronic for our verified knowledge? Are there sociological limitations in a
scientific community known for being usually at the leading edge of the related
technologies? One of these limitations might be that, down to the real rating,
evaluation committees (of programmes, of individuals, of institutions)
primarily take into account refereed "papers" available through
traditional channels. Should not the evaluation processes reflect the
complementarity of the various media? Commercial publishers are coming up with
new publishing models. What are these and are we heading their way? On the
other hand, authors/editors are delivering today finalized/immediately
publishable material, but it can sometimes remain sitting for months with
publishers or subcontractors not always producing satisfactory results. The
question of rights is sometimes raised too as commercial publishers are
reselling at high cost information to institutions from which it originally
came. What role could learned societies play in this context? Should we accept
proposals for community-supported minimum-work wiki-like servers? Are we ready
for Open Access? If so, for which publications? Bibliometric tools, mainly citation-based
ones, have been multiplying of late. What are they measuring exactly? Should we
opt for specific ones or for several, each adapted to specific needs? Should we
develop other evaluation criteria?
The ADS
Position on Open Access, Non-Traditional Information Retrieval, and the New Realms
of Publishing
(Michael
J. Kurtz, ADS)
The
Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System has been a leader in providing access
to the information available in astronomy since its inception, in 1992. The ADS
had as its basic precept "Free Access to Metadata" and quickly added
"Free Access to Archival Literature". These concepts are responsible
for much of the success of Astronomy's Digital Library.
The ADS has
also had a long-time collaboration with the arXiv, providing Open Access to the
full text of articles. We are also involved with the full-text open-access
experiments of nearly every publisher of physics and astronomy journals.
Through its
collaborations with CDS/SIMBAD and NED, the ADS provides access to an enormous
quantity of tabular and measurement data and, through its collaborations with
the major archive and data centers, ADS provides access to a substantial
fraction of astronomy's raw observational data.
The
Pluto Affair:
When
Professionals Talk to Professionals with the Public Watching
(Lars
Lindberg Christensen, ST-ECF)
Join me for
a first-hand look behind the scenes of the Press Room at the International
Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly in Prague that was the setting of one
of the most discussed stories in 2006 – the much hated and loved International
Astronomical Union (IAU) Resolution to define a planet. The Resolution changed
Pluto’s status to a dwarf planet and resulted in an unprecedented emotional
discussion. What actually happened in Prague? What were the negative and positive
outcomes of the Pluto Affair? What can we learn from this experience?
Communicating
Astronomy with the Public
(Lars
Lindberg Christensen ST-ECF & Pedro Russo, MPS)
Communication
of astronomy to the public is important and will play an ever greater role in
the coming years as a link between the astronomical scientific community and
society and supporting formal and informal science education. The communication
of achieved results is now seen frequently as a natural and mandatory activity
to inform the public, attract funding, and attract science students.
There are a
however a number of obstacles in this communication work. The International
Astronomical Union (IAU) Commission 55 “Communicating Astronomy with the
Public” seeks alleviate these problems and to establish and support effective
ways to communicate astronomy with the public in a long term run.
In this
talk we will present the initiatives and activities taking place under the
auspices of the IAU Commission 55: Communicating Astronomy with the Public,
specially the first outcome from the peer-reviewed "Communicating
Astronomy with the Public Journal" working group.
When the
Dog Must Talk to the Cat – Communicating Science to Politicians
(Claus
Madsen, ESO)
From a
communication view, political lobbying for Science means targeted communication
about a long established, well-tested, fact-based and logically rigid system of
inquiry to a highly dynamic environment in which decision-taking is influenced
by many non- scientific factors and with norms that differ widely from the tenets
of science. The talk discusses some of the communication issues that arise when
these very different worlds meet.
Open Access: "A consommer avec
modération"
(Terence
J. Mahoney, IAC)
There is
increasing pressure on academics and researchers to publish the results of
their investigations in open access journals. Indeed, some funding agencies
make open access publishing a basic requirement for funding projects, and the
EU is about to take firm steps in this direction. I argue that astronomy is
already one of the most open of disciplines, and that access - both to the
general public (in terms of a significantly growing outreach effort) and to
developing countries (through efforts to provide computing facilities and
Internet access, as well as schemes to provide research centres of limited
resources with journals) - is becoming more and more open in a genuine and
lasting way. I further argue that sudden switches to more formal kinds of open
access schemes could cause irreparable harm to astronomical publishing. Several
of the most prestigious astronomical research journals (e.g. MN, ApJ, and AJ)
have for more than a century met the publishing needs of the research community
and continue to adapt successfully to changing demands on the part of that
community. The after-effects of abrupt changes in publishing practices -
implemented through primarily political concerns - are hard to predict and
could be severely damaging. I conclude that open access, in its current
acceptation, should be studied with great care and with sufficient time before
any consideration is given to its implementation. If forced on unwilling
publishing and research communities, open access could well result in much more
restricted access to research results.
The
Journals of the American Astronomical Society
(Kevin B.
Marvel, AAS)
I will
present the outlook for the AAS journals in the near and far future. After many
years at the University of Chicago Press, the AAS journals will move to IOP
Publishing in 2008 (AJ) and 2009 (ApJ, ApJL, ApJS). This transition provides opportunities to
enhance the functionality and value of the journals for the astronomical
community. Better connectivity to the
underlying processed data presented in refereed manuscripts, ease-of-use
features such as reference water marks on figures and development of a
community-focused portal are among the many new features currently under
consideration. The goal for the AAS
journals in the future is to be more central in the day-to-day research life of
astronomers while maintaining our low cost to both subscribers and authors and
the high quality of our journals both online and in print.
Learned
Societies as Publishers – The RAS and Monthly Notices
(Paul
Murdin, RAS)
The
function of a scientific learned society is to advance the science in a way
that satisfies the interests of its members, who belong to the relevant
scientific community. Their primary
interest is to act as a group of peers who maintain the standards of the
community in an organised way and to provide a framework which at the same time
does this but allows individual scientists to act vigorously. I will explore the balance to be struck in
these ambitions.
Publishing
for Learned Societies – The Secret Life of a Scholarly Publisher
(David
Nicholson, Blackwell)
Learned
journals remain an essential part of the scholarly communication process. The
choice of journal is shaped by a variety of factors. Accepted articles are in
many cases handled by a publisher, often working on behalf of a learned
society. As well as providing a sophisticated technical service, such
publishers play a broader role in supporting the work of societies.
Wiley-Blackwell publishes journals on behalf of more than 700 such groups and I
will discuss the breadth and depth of our role.
Open
Access Publishing in Particle Physics: The SCOAP³ Model
(Stéphane Plaszczynski, LAL)
On behalf
of our SCOAP³ Party, I will present the model that is being developed for Open
Access Publishing in Particle Physics. It will lead very quickly (within the
year) to a major orientation in the field into "Gold OA" and
hopefully spread to similar disciplines as astrophysics.
EDP
Sciences' Views on Future Professional Publishing
(Jean-Marc Quilbé, EDP Sciences)
[tbp]
Main colloquium page: http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~heck/fpca.htm
List of
participants: http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~heck/fpca_part.htm
Programme: http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~heck/fpca_prog.htm