International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2004‐2005: Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Era

Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University, UK)

Journal of Documentation

ISSN: 0022-0418

Article publication date: 1 August 2005

100

Keywords

Citation

Oppenheim, C. (2005), "International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2004‐2005: Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Era", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 4, pp. 560-561. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510616066

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The Facet International Yearbook series seems to have adopted the market niche once occupied by the Librarianship and Information Work Worldwide annual series that was published by Bowker Saur, namely a series of authoritative essays on a chosen topic or topics reviewing the relevant literature and providing value‐added commentary. This series, under the general editorship of Gary Gorman, involves guest or associate editors, and this volume's Associate Editor is Fytton Rowland, well known for his work in the field of electronic scholarly publishing. The book comprises ten chapters, written primarily by the UK and Australian authors, and covering broad themes on scholarly publishing trends, institutional perspectives, e‐books, economic issues and usage statistics. The book is supported by a good index.

The topics covered are all interesting and the authors are authorities in their areas. Starting with Rowland's excellent introductory overview, via Alicia Wise's lively, personal and provocative suggestions for collaboration in the future, Colin Steele's thoughtful review of library perspectives, John Cox's wide‐ranging assessment of commercial trends, David Prosser's evangelism for OA journals, Pinfield's considered overview of institutional repositories, Louise Edward's authoritative overview of e‐books and John Houghton's review of economic issues, the vast majority of the contributions were well worth reading. I was only disappointed by two chapters – by Chowdhury's discussion on access and usability, which was about digital libraries rather than scholarly publishing, and by Shepherd's much too brief account of usage statistics.

There are some minor inconsistencies in the ways references are cited in the book. David Prosser's otherwise excellent piece on open access had some minor historical inaccuracies regarding the name of the first scientific journal and the reasons why scientists in the early days wanted to get published – for a more authoritative review (Hall, 1962). Some of the chapters show their age, not noting the outcome of the recent House of Commons Select Committee inquiry into STM publishing or the launch of the most recent PLoS Journals.

In addition to these minor problems, the book suffers from some weaknesses. The first is (other than Alicia Wise, who in any case is not covering her topic particularly from a publisher's angle) the lack of any contributors from the scholarly publishing community, either not for profit or for profit. It would have helped to have read Reed Elsevier's or Springer's point of view, for example. The second is, despite the presence of a genuinely international Editorial Advisory Board, the Anglo‐Australian bias means the book will have limited appeal to readers outside those countries. The third is that it looks at the situation primarily from an academic library's point of view, and does not sufficiently address the perspectives of authors, commercial libraries or publishers. These weaknesses are combined with a lack of detailed discussion on preservation, legal issues or the impact of Google Scholar and other means of bibliographic access and control. Finally, the book seems to be poor value for money and is likely only to appeal to libraries rather than individuals, which is a pity.

Don't be misled by these criticisms, though; despite its limitations, there is more than enough good material in the book to justify institutional purchase and the book can be recommended to all libraries with an interest in the future of scholarly publishing.

References

Hall, A.R. (1962), The Scientific Revolution 1500‐1800, Longman, London.

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