SLA Global 2000 Conference, Brighton, UK, 16-19 October 2000

Desmond Reaney, Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd

As its name implies, Institute of Physics Publishing is the publishing arm of the Instituteof Physics, a not-for-profit learned and society founded in 1874.

Our purpose is to help the Institute promote the advancement and dissemination of a knowledge of, and education in, the science of physics, pure and applied.

As the publishing arm of the Institute, we do this by publishing 36 research journals, 7 magazines and over 60 new book titles a year.

We have also have a Web site www.iop.org which houses electronic products like AXIOM (containing INSPEC, Compendex, and the Derwent World Patent Index databases), as well as our electronic journals and a number of free services like PhysicsWeb and Physics Express Letters, a Web-based service allowing free access to the letters section of 13 of our journals. Currently the Web site receives over 1.8 million hits a month.

In terms of our commercial base, we sell our publications to customers in over 100 countries around the world. Quite a few of these are in developing countries such as Bangladesh, Botswana, China, Ethiopia and Fiji, while others are in countries like Croatia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Russia and the Ukraine which, in recent years, have suffered from war or from the partial collapse of their economies.

In 1997, one year after we launched our electronic journals service, we decided to make the service free to all academic institutions in Africa, as a way of improving the equity of access to physics information resources for African physicists.

To do this, we got in touch with the African Society of Physicists and Mathematicians and, with their help, executed a promotion mailing to the Head of Physics at institutions throughout Africa.

The mailing consisted of a letter and leaflet (show) inviting them to register for free online access to all our journals. This was followed up by email and phone, where details were available. Further promotion was done a year later but, given the poor response to both campaigns (only 4 institutions actually registered), not much has been done since to promote the offer - even though it still stands.

The reason for the poor response is that many institutions in Africa are not wired for the Internet or, if they are, their communications infrastructure (in terms of telecomm facilities or bandwidth etc) is severely limited and unable to support a reasonable degree of online access.

Another way in which we sought to improve the equity of access to information resources was to launch the New Journal of Physics, an electronic only journal publishing research articles from across the whole of physics, which is free to anyone with access to the Internet. This is co-published with the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft and is endorsed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, better known as SPARC.

Other methods of improving equity of access include the modification of global pricing policies, special consortia arrangements, and co-operative ventures with organisations in Russia and China.

With regard to global pricing, the economic problems suffered by many countries in South-east Asia and South America a couple of years ago, prompted us to offer substantial special discounts to institutions in countries like Malaysia and Brazil, to enable them to maintain their subscriptions while funding was practically non-existent.

Clearly, the cost of some scientific journals is a financial deterrent to access to information for many institutions in developing countries. However, this can also be the case for institutions in developed countries that experience major political and economic upheaval.

For example, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many institutions in Russia with a strong commitment to physics were left without acquisition funds of any kind. In response, we made journals freely available for several of years to a number of Russian institutions.

We also established an editorial office at the Ioffee Institute in St Petersburg to make it easier for Russian physicists to get their papers published in internationally recognised journals. Incidentally, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, Professor Zhores Alferov, is head of that institute and publishes much of his work in our journals.

Still in Russia, it's worth mentioning that we recently concluded a special consortium agreement with the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, which gives online access to all of our journals to over 160 Russian institutions.

In the developing world, consortium agreements that could improve access to scientific material on a national scale tend to be more difficult to do. For example, in China, where we recently established an editorial office in Beijing at the Chinese Institute of Physics, there is a problem with Internet access to external Web sites.

Chinese academics can get free access to domestic sites through CERNET (the Chinese Education and Research Net), but they have to pay the cost of access to external sites, and such access is subject to approval by the Chinese government.

In an effort to make our journals available to a consortium of Chinese universities, we will be conducting a caching server trial, with government approval, in the New Year. The cost of using a Digital Island line into China, and the Internet costs to Chinese users of our site, are costs that we will bear. To that end we will be subsidising access to our online journals.

Under a separate agreement with the Chinese Physical Society, we will publish Chinese Physics and Chinese Physics Letters from January 2001. The chief reason for this initiative is to improve the dissemination of physics research findings from China, by means of electronic publication and much greater promotion of the two titles.

Finally, before moving on to some examples of what other publishers are doing, or have already done, I just want say that we are currently working on another initiative that will make our journal more accessible to everyone, including those in the developing world. Hopefully we'll be in a position to make a formal announcement later this year.

With regard to other publishers, many of them work with government organisations

like the British Council here in the UK, or non-governmental organisations like the World Bank, or with not-for-profit organisations like the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, known as INASP, about whom I'll have more to say in a moment.

They also work through their trade associations, such as the Publishers Association, to press the case for equity of access to information by campaigning for public spending on books, journals, and information for schools, colleges and libraries.

Individually, many of them produce cheaper publications for use in poorer countries. Collectively a number are involved in collaborative projects, such as work on systems or procedures that will cater for the wider dissemination of information via new technology, such as the Cross Ref initiative.

To give a few specific examples of ways in which publishers in both developed, and developing countries are working, either alone or with others to improve the equity of access to information resources, one can cite initiatives such as:

• The African Virtual University (http://avu.worldbank.org/part2.cfm). This is an interactive-instructional telecommunications network, funded by the World Bank, designed to enable use of modern information technology to increase access to educational resources throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
• In Brazil, publishers of 29 scholarly journals have made the full-text of their journals available through the Scientific Electronic Library Online known as ScieELO http://www.scielo.br).
• Full-text Science Journals on the Net (http://libs.uga.edu/science/fullalph.html), maintained by the University of Georgia Science Library, includes links to over 4,000 full-text journals on the Internet, or those with at least some full-text articles, which are accessible at no cost.
• The Bridge to Asia Foundation (http://www.bridge.org) which has organised donations of more than 1.5 million books and other materials from publishers and wholesalers to recipients in China, and more than 1 million to other countries in South-east Asia, such as Cambodia and Vietnam.
• Sociological Research Online, funded by the eLib programme in the UK and published by the University of Surrey, which provides free subscriptions to countries whose GDP falls below a certain threshold.
• The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (http://med-ed-online.org) which has facilitated the electronic publication of some 15 peer-reviewed journals published in Brazil, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

There are many other examples, but perhaps the best place to go for more information about ways in which publishers are working to improve the equity of access to information resources, is to visit the Web site of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) at http://www.inasp.org.uk

INASP is a co-operative network of partners aiming to improve world-wide access to information. In particular, its mission is to improve the flow of information within and between countries, especially those with less well developed systems of publication and dissemination.

Among its many activities INASP supports Internet Travelling Workshops in developing countries; it publishes Africa Journals Online, and it provides links on its Web site giving quick-access guides to selected Web sites and Internet resources which will be of special interest to the library and information science community, and to scientists and publishers in developing countries.

While quite a lot is being done by the publishing community, there is still much more that needs to be done if developing countries are to be able to compete in the increasingly globalised, knowledge-based economies of the 21st Century.

Thirty years ago, knowledge doubled every 14 years; it is now doubling every 7 years. Not only is the speed of discovery increasing, but the rate at which knowledge is applied has become more rapid thanks to the Internet and other modern forms of communication.

For developing countries to be able to access global networks and tap into global sources of knowledge, they have to be provided with the technical resources to make this possible. The same is true if they are to engage in two-way communication with the developed world, and avoid the Web-based cultural imperialism that could result if their people are not educated and trained to use this new technology. The Web offers a new way of pooling scarce resources but it is dependent on infrastructure strengths to make it available to the developing world.

Unfortunately for all publishers, whether in the developed or in the developing world, the solution to such problems is outside their control. For their part, publishers will do their best to meet perceived information needs, wherever they are. The hope is that for some countries, where the real need is for penicillin rather Pentiums, the governments of the developed world will do their best to improve not only the equity of access to information, but also the equity of access to basic healthcare, education and employment.

Page last updated: October 13, 2000