Live from ACS

Hmmm, a conference with poor wireless coverage. Who woulda thunk?

But at least it's there and it's free. At the moment though, I'm at the hotel taking a little break. I could use more air conditioning in my room.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I came. The main events for C-INF (the division I'm a part of) have so far been all about open access and scholarly publishing. There is one very amusing guy that insists that everyone needs to call it open access publishing, and that his model for open access is the only correct one. (He's into self-archiving.) He told a panelist that preservation isn't a problem, access is. (She begged to differ.) And insists that peer review won't go away and good journals will stay around just fine. He's a bit of a zealot.

Most everyone else has been well reasoned--enough so that I am a lot more hopeful now than when I showed up. There is such a mixture of models that one of them will float to the top. There does, however, seem to be a notion that open access = author pays and that it will never succeed because authors refuse to pay. (And did you know that Pergamon, which was swallowed up by Elsevier a few years back, started out as a publisher that was catering to authors who were fed up with page charges? I didn't.) While that is certainly the dominant model for free-subscription journals at this point, I think there's a bunch of different models that might work out.

Perhaps what will happen (picture me gazing into a crystal ball here) is that....

• The major journals will open their backfiles (ala PubMedCentral--free content after 6 or 12 months). They're just so important that library's will continue to subscribe anyone. I'm talking about the likes of Science, Nature, JACS, Cell, etc.


• Major journals for sub-discipliines will retain subsribers at institutions where that research gets done. So Duck U will retain Molecular Cell and Development, butpurge ourselves of every last botany and zoology title.


• A document delivery service will become the norm. But we need to remove all barriers to the end-user. Will we charge? I think we're going to have to. I imagine that every student will get X number of articles per year for free, every graduate student will get nX (where n is a multiplier that reflects their more intense reading habits--perhaps 5 or 10) and faculty will get mX (where m is a multiplier that puts them far enough above the graduate students to feel good about themselves, but low enough so that the library can still make a buck now and then. All available research tells me that graduate students would need MORE than faculty, but try and sell that one).


• Certain institutional repositories will evolve into subject-based e-print servers. So maybe Duck U gets vertebrate development and sports marketing and Beaver U gets West Nile virus and sustainable viticulture.


• Lots and lots of commercial journals will cease publishing.


• Commercial publishers will create free-floating editorial boards who will peer-review the vast amount of research that gets vetted out of the remaining big-name journals.


• Societies will step in to vet the research of niche-disciplines that are commercially un-viable.

So that's my first stab at crystal balling based on what I've heard. Perhaps I'll actually summarize the speakers later.

Now for Philly: It's a lot different than I remember it. But I was pretty focussed on the art last time. Took a walk last night past the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall. You can't even got close after hours any more. It's a shame--I'm really glad they haven't taken the same approach with the Lincolm Monument (at least they hadn't when I was there in November of 2001). I also walked past the last remaining 18th century tavern. It is no longer a bar. That's too bad. I would have had a drink.

Oh--drinks. Decent beer here is $5. Is it that way in all big downtowns now, or am I just going in the wrong places?