Journal Publishing in China - Inside and Outside View:

*** preliminary notes***

Presenter: Adrian Stanley - The Charlesworth Group (USA)
Time: July 12 2007 at 1:45 – 2:45pm
Location: SFU Harbour Centre Earl and Jennie Lohn Floor Policy Room - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Abstract

Adrian Stanley, CEO of the Charlesworth Group (USA), presented at the Public Knowledge Project Conference problems surrounding publishing in China.

The Charlesworth Group is a UK family firm dating back to 1928. As China emerges as a major player on the global field, many corporations have begun taking interest in them. For example, Bill Gates visits China for the first time in 1994 and since then has introduced several opportunities for Microsoft in Asia. The Charlesworth Group also noted the opportunities in this country and began working there in 1999, offering publishing services ranging from typesetting to printing and binding. Services are also provided through a subsidiary of the group, Maney Publishing.

Adrian has lived in China from 2000-2004, seen his group’s presence grow from a staff of 3 to over a hundred in that period. He and his group have worked with Chinese editors, government bodies (MOE, MOST, CAS), experts from areas such as Beijing, to promote and facilitate greater scholarly communication. With the world’s largest population, China has the potential to further the current available knowledge. William A. Wells has written a book, The Returning Tide, on this. The ISI web of science has already shown that China has taken large steps in their contribution to the scholarly community with approximately 70,000 journals (2005).

A further reason why China has become increasingly popular is that it is an untapped market. There is a large opportunity for sales and growth through subscriptions and readers. The copyright situation has greatly improved as the government has taken further steps to crack down on piracy, which the Charlesworth Group furthers by becoming a liaison to American copyright laws. There is also an increase in Chinese authors, the value of their work to various disciplines, notably the sciences. Ultimately, the arguments laid forth by the Charlesworth Group are to promote their mission: Scholarly communication is advanced if all scholars have access to the widest range of other scholars’ works.

To promote China’s presence on the global field, this organization has acted in some ways as a bridge. It has assisted locals in understanding how to take part in this global economy of scholarly publishing as well as ways to open their doors to their knowledge through e-publishing.

Some facts about publishing in China

In 2005, top three internal journal publishing contributers*

- Research institutes published 1399 journals (25.97%)
- Higher education institutes published 1347 journals (25%)
- Societies, associations published 1339 journals (24.86%)

Also, there are about 300 English language journals available in China.

* this data is from MOST

Currently, universities fund journals not for profit and they publish internal papers within the university community, restricting them locally. What the Charlesworth Group aims to do is to:

- make the universities more business-orientated to become self-sustainable.
- divide most general university journals into specialized ones.
- separate the duties editing and publishing of journals.
- help some high quality university journals expand internationally.
- establish international editorial board and peer-review system with journals that publish in English, keeping contributions from home but also allowing those from abroad, to ultimately increase the international impact.
- publish more OA papers/journals.
- increase co-operative training courses from internationally recognized organizations personnel

Already, some steps have been taken in that direction. In 2006, Springer and China’s Higher Education Press established a 5 year partnership to co-publish 27 journals

Conclusion

While China is still developing, it is undoubtedly a major untouched market. Like any venture, there will be challenges but with the right partners, and given the opportunities, China can reach its full potential as a global player.

"Extending OJS into Cultural Magazines: The OMMM Project"

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007 9:40--10:40 July13, 2007

Presentators:
John Maxwell Mpub PhD, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, SFU "The Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing is located at the Simon Fraser University Vancouver campus' Harbour Centre building in downtown Vancouver."

John Maxwell is an assistant professor at SFU, located in Burnaby, BC. John became a part of online publishing in the 1990's. He was involved with web designing at Knossopolis Media; he developed instructional material for different media at Open Learning Agency; as well as worked as a consultant for XML with various projects. John has his Master of Publishing and a PhD in education specializing in computer use. He is involved at the Canadian Center for Publishing. His work has and passion has lead him to develop blogs and wikis in an inquiry approach to his class with undergrads and grads. He is now working on his vision to use OJS in the development of cultural magazines in the "Online Magazines Management Model (OMMM) project". On his blog site, JMax is looking for contribution from cultural magazines. For more information on the research being collected read his OMMM Thinkubator blog.

Abstract
Presentation Power Point

J. Maxwell is not directly part of the OJS project but his work is along side this project. His purpose was to see if the OJS system could be extended into the magazine realm as well as scholarly journal publishing. There were similarities and the OJS model of workflow might be adapted for small, independent magazines. So far there has not been any magazine using OJS. J. Maxwell looked into why not. Conversely, how could OJS benefit from exploring publishing modules in magazine?

By looking at Geist Magazine which has a 10,000 subscription based readers, grants for funding and a small staff to compare models. Initially there seemed to be similarities between scholarly journals and the independent magazine: a community of known contributors, a stable reader base, submission/review processes, marginal budgets and an interest on web publication.

Initially there seemed to be a good fit with OJS as the magazines could use the workflow, they also had their methods of assessing their material and OJS could offer: (as taken from the OJS site)
OJS is installed locally and locally controlled.
Editors configure requirements, sections, review process.
Online submission and management of all content.
Subscription module with delayed open access options.
Comprehensive indexing of content part of global system.
Reading Tools ... based on field and editors' choice.
Email notification and commenting ability for readers.
Complete context-sensitive online Help support.
What became apparent was there were also differences in the models the two types of publishing. How the article was viewed and used by the two spheres resulted in different practices. In scholarly journals the article is the building block of academic productivity and is the source of the author claiming ownership of a set of ideas; the publishing the written word is the claim of ownership or intellectual property. The article is peer-reviewed but its integrity is kept whole and inviolable. Scholar editors tread lightly. The editing process is a more hands off approach in the journal.

Magazine content is more varied, not always clearly authored or attributed and very heavily edited. It can be aggregated with other articles to make it longer.
The front of the magazine material is written by editorial staff, aggregated together in context and look. The purpose is to represent a particular world view or perspective (brand) the magazine is trying to project.

In a larger context the journals are like a series. They cite, reference and review each other. It takes considerable time to complete a topic and they can be seen as diachronic. Magazines are assembled issue-by-issue. Each article is Independent and tied to economics of the audiences’ response. If readership sees themselves represented in the mix then it sells. The articles are not chronically related or not even necessarily connected and are synchronic.

Magazines are looking for more active participation with their readers. The Web 2.0 model extends this framework.
Content repurposing for magazines–clip articles and have a toolkit so aggregate able for readers.

Magazines can use aspects of OJS like online submission and workflow support. But they need online massaging of content for reiterative and aggregation of the content. They are using a variety of tools between different magazines and even within themselves; Drupal , Bricolage and Google Docs, Backpack etc. They are using bits and pieces to make things work.

They need an open ended repertoire of content types (advertising, reader content etc), content re-purposing (a dynamic view), content granularity, collaborative, online editing (so they can work on the same piece at the same time), audience interaction and a flexible configuration is a key feature. Create workflow.

As journals outsource to the layout editor, for magazines, OJS would have to incorporated this into layout editor. XML (digital humanities production) seems to be the ideals for storing and editing but it is costly. XHTML and simple Web2.0 is may become part of the solution. At this point OJS is not suitable for magazine purposes. As scholarly publications become scholarly communications and embrace more digital media it may make this possible in the future.


Comments:
This was a well designed foray into the comparison of scholarly publishing and the independent magazine. The premise stretches back to Oldenburg's steps of bringing scholarly letters to print for the public, in the development of the first journal, Philosophical Transactions. J. Maxwell tried to bring the model of online (OJS) workflow to shape the publishing model of independent magazines. In his study it became clear that scholarly journals still carry some aspects of the letter for communication. They are often like a series, with responses back and forth to each other, requiring the reading of all the material to fully understand the topic. The material is treated with a form of sacredness, with minimum editing. The purpose of the author(s) and the research, rather than the overall perspective of the journal or the editor. The intellectual property rights of the content, is highly respected in journals. Magazines have a different purpose. They are focussed on the tastes of the reader and the image or world view of the publication. This can result in heavier editing of the paper content, rather than just the structure and validity. As a result of this intense editing, OJS would have to undergo some significant changes to become efficient for magazine publishing.


Projects:
Thinkubator
Blog
CCPS (Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing)
Research Interest

"Moving beyond the print versus electronic binary in scholarly publishing"

PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007 1:45-2:45 July 12, 2007

Blogs will be done live and initially posted errors and all. Please return after the conference dates to view edited discussions of the presentation.

Maria S. Bonn and Shana Kimball spoke about different aspects of their experiences of building a publishing model in relationship with the University Library. The Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) was formed in 2001. Maria spoke about the history that propelled the development of library publishing and Shauna spoke on the experience of practicing a Library open access publishing model

After the case history by M. Bonn was presented, S. Kimball analyzed the print versus online issue. The purpose of OA publishing is to help scholars take advantage publishing options. OA publishing is not a one size fits all. Different approaches are beneficial. The SPO is developing serial publications that are simultaneously published as print, dual format publication. The goal was to create a wide as possible distribution of the material. The SPO became an intermediate between the printer and the producer. They found that although books are free and online many readers prefer to have a print copy to work with or read for either convenience or other long term reading preferences.

The challenge of moving toward online publications is potentially one of familiarity and comfort with technology. There is a tension between the sense of prestige of a bound, print form, and the reality of a page number versus the availability of the article along with quick searches within the material that can be done. It may be that the tension between print and online publishing is more perception of feelings rather than facts.

Presentators:
Shana Kimball, University of Michigan University Library
Scholarly Publishing Office and their related Projects.

Abstract

PowerPoints:
Everything Old is New Again:Repurposing Collections at the University of Michigan through Print on Demand