Thursday, November 7, 2002

Scholarly Publishers Aim to Woo Librarians Away From Self-Published Research By SCOTT CARLSON A group of scholarly publishers will begin a public-relations campaign this month that is intended to improve publishers' image among librarians and academics. The campaign aims, in part, to quash a newfound enthusiasm among some librarians for self-publishing research results online, a practice that lets scholars bypass academic journals that many researchers say are too slow and too costly. Supporters of the campaign also say that it will be an attempt to mend relations with librarians and academics. "The long-term goal is to re-establish that we are allies with the academic world," says Lynn Rienner, the founder of the social-sciences publishing company Lynn Rienner Publishers, who has helped shape the campaign. She says relations between librarians and publishers have been portrayed as "adversarial" and as "warring camps" in the press, a characterization that hurts her. "It was because of librarians that I got into publishing," she says. The campaign is sponsored by the scholarly-publishing division of the Association of American Publishers and will be run by Edelman, a giant public-relations firm based in Chicago and New York. The publishers and the firm are still working out details of the campaign, but mailings, advertisements, summits between librarians and publishers, and speakers at conferences have all been proposed. "It's something that we'll have to keep at for years," says Ted Nardin, vice president of the scientific and technical division of McGraw-Hill, a leading publisher. "It's not just a six-month program." Beyond smoothing ruffled feathers, the publishers seek to reach academics and librarians who advocate distributing research results on the Internet. Marc H. Brodsky, the executive director and chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes several prominent journals, says the campaign will emphasize the perks that working with traditional publishers brings: money for marketing, the prestige of a well-known journal, the expertise and mediation of an editor, and the management of peer review. "There is an illusion that electronic publishing is cheap," Mr. Brodsky says. "There are ways of putting things on the Web that are cheap, but not ways that give the value that publishers provide." However, the campaign will not focus on the sharply rising cost of journal subscriptions -- one of the main rubs between publishers, on the one hand, and academics and librarians, on the other. "I really don't see it as the key issue," says Mr. Nardin, of McGraw-Hill. "My view of this program is that our objective is not to convey pricing but to convey what publishers are doing." But Kenneth Frazier, director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that rising journal costs have been the driving force behind Internet-based alternative-publishing efforts. "The problem is that a lot of commercial publishers are not only addicted to profits -- they are addicted to high revenue growth, too," he says. "That creates a situation that is sure to motivate alternative systems for disseminating knowledge." Journal-subscription rates have gone up an average of 8.5 percent per year since 1986, while library budgets have risen 5.6 percent per year, according to ARL Statistics, a publication of the Association of Research Libraries. "The notion of doing some work of repairing the relationship between publishers and librarians is not a bad idea," adds Mr. Frazier, who founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC, which supports alternative-publishing strategies. But "if we're going to disseminate knowledge, we're going to have to have a more affordable model of scholarly communication. That is the big question that I would want to raise." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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