Publisher Liaison Reports

Suzanne Fedunok
suzanne.fedunok@nyu.edu

Report of the Springer Library Advisory Board Meeting, New Orleans, November 14-16, 2004

This was the kickoff meeting, as advisors and advisees got comfortable with each other and with the format. Committed participation and openness were encouraged. Needless to say it was important to have done one's homework about Springer and Kluwer to be an effective contributor. Thanks to those who shared their concerns and ideas in advance with me. We were meeting with company vice presidents and top management, mostly from marketing and sales.

Library Advisory Board (LAB) members will serve three year terms and one-third will rotate off the board each year. An earlier email message to PAM gave the membership, which includes several PAM members (see http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S2=pamnet&q=springer+advisory&s=&f=&a=&b=). The company plans to appoint similar LAB's in other parts of the world.

Action items and minutes are confidential, but it's safe to report we were consulted about the newly-merged company and it's products and services. There were no startling announcements to be shared. While it seemed we were saying things that appear on science listservs every day and not offering a lot of wisdom or even knowledge, there is obviously a benefit to in-person communication to reinforce and elaborate our points. And PAM is committed to the publisher liaison function.

Publisher presentations followed by Q and A that focussed on the company's concerns and issues was instructive. Most of the presentations came from marketing and sales people. There was one presentation from a technical person involved with SpringerLink.

Looking at how successful this first LAB meeting was, as an advisor I think we were as influential as possible under the circumstances, and I believe the company got a lot of what it wanted from the exercise. For example, it's not breaking confidentiality to report we were asked about online journal backfile programs, we mentioned:

• missing issues
• lack of full issue content
• too many clicks to get to the message if a reader is not entitled to access
• confirmed the usefulness of hot links in older materials
• want to choose journal titles, not be forced into a pre-selected subject package.

Open Access backfiles was discussed. Then Open Access and "Open Choice" for current issues came up. Which led to packages in general and it is no secret that librarians are hostile to packages as pricing models.

We of course reported that use data was vital to us, and we learned that Springer takes compliance with the Counter project seriously. It was a revelation to find out how complex collection and reporting of data can be for a large publisher with large numbers of customers.

I particularly relished a "blue sky" session about the future of scientific communication and was able to pitch the semantic web, which I learned about at the SLA Annual Conference last year.

I learned a lot from the questions raised by the other board members at the final session when we turned the tables and queried the Springer executives, who were pretty frank (as far as I could tell) with their replies.

The next rencontre will be a teleconference in June 2005.

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