geneva-final

A report on the closing session

of the Workshop on the

Open Archives Initiative and Peer Review Journals in Europe

Session Report: Raf Dekeyser, Corrado Pettenati, Herbert Van de Sompel

Session Chair: William Y. Arms

Session Scribe: Thomas Krichel

The panel discussions of the workshop on "The Open Archives Initiative and Peer Review Journals in Europe" were mainly concerned with the following topics: peer review, economical aspects, technical protocol for certification, the role of the library and organisational structure to support change in scholarly communication.

In connection with these topics, during a concluding general discussion, the following remarks were made and the following actions were proposed:

1. Peer review:

The participants were unanimous in their belief that the certification of scholarly work remains a fundamental part of a system for scholarly communication. A small group of participants insisted that the existing peer-review mechanism fulfils certification in an appropriate way. A larger group believed that the electronic environment allows for novel approaches to accord quality stamps to scholarly works. Everyone agreed that such novel mechanisms would still have to prove their validity. However, this burden of proof was not regarded a show-stopper for experimental work in this area, and such work was actually strongly encouraged. Some insisted that the result of such experimentation would lead to the reinvention of peer-review. Others replied that part of the experimentation could be about moving the existing peer-review system outside of the realm of established publishers.

Some ideas were brought forward regarding metrics that could be extracted from a fully electronic communication system, the combination of which could be used to obtain quality assessments for scholarly works: usage counts of a work, automatically extracted citation information with a scope beyond the core journals, amount of discussion generated by a paper submitted in a system with open peer-review and peer-comment, ...

Further suggestions concerned the role of the learned societies (which should be convinced to take up their responsibility regarding peer review), the importance of obtaining funding for experiments in the area of certification of works in an electronic environment, and the rewarding of peer-reviewers as a means to encourage scholars to take part in the quality assessment process (e.g. through publishing their name...).

2. Economical aspects

Preprint servers storing uncertified material introduce marginal costs. The uncertified material submitted to such servers can be paid for by the author, the research institutions and/or by the public, as has generally been the case in the paper-based communication system. As such, it seems possible to offer free access to uncertified materials. However, there was a consensus about the fact that a cost element that could not be reduced by moving to a fully electronic scholarly communication system was the cost of the peer-review process, as it is currently conducted. Some felt that new models of peer-review should not be too expensive, since cost elements would mainly be e-mail costs and small incentives for the reviewers.

Again, there seemed to be consensus that the author or the publisher -- in the sense of the Dublin Core -- of the uncertified work should cover these peer-reviewing costs. Several arguments were given in favour of such an approach:

It is the author who gets the intellectual reward for the publication;
Covering the costs should make the author more aware of the publication cost;
The dissemination of scholarly work should be considered to be an essential part of the process of publicly funded research.

It was noted that suggested economical models should be investigated on their feasibility in poor countries and that the approach suggested in the above might be problematic in that context.

It was also noted that there is a need for an inventory of current business models for electronic journals. There should be case studies investigating successful and non-successful models. Here, the notion of success itself would have to be defined, since it is a matter of perspective.

Currently, libraries have the impression that the possibilities of the digital world are leading to an increase of expenditure. Therefore, libraries have incentives to play an active role in helping to build a new scholarly communication system. Doing so will require funding, which could be obtained from savings on current expenditures: eliminating redundancies in the accessed information, a better selection of the purchased journals on the basis of the quality of the peer-review process.

3. Protocol for certification

There was strong support for the extension of the usage of the OAI protocol beyond discovery-related metadata. Given the focus of the workshop on peer-review, concrete actions were suggested to address the exchange of certification-related metadata using the OAI protocol in a trusted environment. The representatives from the American Physical Society and the Los Alamos arXiv volunteered to participate in a prototype exploring the concepts discussed during the discussion session on the topic. Concrete actions will be taken by the OAI to facilitate such a prototype and to involve technical experts from the US and Europe. It was also suggested that the OAI pay full attention to related standardisation work that is conducted by other organisations such as the W3C, the Dublin Core, the German certification metadata effort, etc. The representative of the OAI fully agreed with this point of view.

4. The role of the libraries

The participants assigned two different roles to the libraries:

a technical role with respect to establishing systems to support scholarly communication
a role in increasing the awareness of the academic community regarding ongoing issues in scholarly communication

Especially LIBER, as research library organisation in Europe, should take some responsibility. LIBER could help in the determination of the required metadata standards for efficient interoperability of the archives. The ongoing work regarding the Dublin Core should be taken into account when doing so. LIBER could also be of help in creating an integrated environment for the use of classification schemes. Furthermore, LIBER could organise some concerted action for supporting the technical framework brought forward by the OAI.

LIBER and the individual libraries should also be more active in raising awareness regarding the OAI and how the OAI framework can play a role in the reform of scholarly communication. This activity can be performed in collaboration with other organisations, like SPARC(-Europe?) or ICOLC.

5. Organisational structure

A lot of distributed activity is going on in the realm of e-print servers and the OAI. Therefore, there may be a need for a coordinating organisation at the European level.

Taking into account SPARC's activities so far, it is uncertain whether SPARC(-Europe) could play a facilitating role in the promotion of e-print centred systems. More recent SPARC activities at least suggest this possibility.
Currently, it is not evident that a new coordinating organisation should be created.
The desired coordination could be a new task for LIBER. It is important that LIBER, as library organisation, maintains good communication channels with the other stakeholders (researchers, learned societies, funding agencies, technical experts...).

The OAI itself will seriously look into having a broader European involvement both in its Steering Committee as in its Technical Committee.

Final recommendations:

Challenged to name the three most urgent recommendations, the audience suggested the following:

Conduct work in the area of using the OAI protocol for certification-related metadata. Create certification schemes building on existing efforts, where possible.
Some credible library organisations should get in touch with scholarly publishers to promote the concept of exposing metadata of the materials (articles, books...) they publish via the OAI protocol.
Increase the amount of institutional and/or departmental OAI-compatible e-print servers and take actions to promote submission of scholarly work to those servers.