The annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing was held on May 27–29, 2009, in Baltimore, MD, and was attended by Debbie Broadrick, Assistant Editor of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics (IJM). Talks were given on a variety of topics relevant to publishing, including copyright and licensing agreements, managing electronic content, relationships between publishers and academic libraries, and new publishing models on the horizon.
The keynote address was given by Adam Bly, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seed magazine, Chairman of Seed Media Group, and occasional consultant to Barack Obama on matters of the transformative power of science in today’s world.
Relating Mr. Bly’s talk to scholarly publishing, we find (based on the survey, “State of Science Report,” 2008, Seed Media Group) that:
- science is not a closed system (65% of scientists cite literature as having an influence on their science);
- global collaboration is fundamental (over 60% of researchers are actively involved in at least one collaboration);
- peer-review still matters (77% of researchers agree that peer-review remains essential to scientific progress);
- scientists want unimpeded and centralized access to information (84% of researchers believe scientific papers should be freely available to other scientists and the public).
These important issues continue to be addressed at IJM through the use of a centralized editorial process, facilitating communication between editors, authors, and referees around the world, electronic submissions and processing of papers, reducing delay in published research, high standards for peer-review of papers, and a policy of open-access of full-text electronic content through our partnership with Project Euclid.
