SLA/PAM Astronomy Roundtable
Wednesday June 6, 2007
11:00-12:30, 1:00-3:00
Denver Convention Center room 505
Sponsor: Springer , 34 attendees
Moderators: Joe Murphy & Sara Russell Gonzalez
Scribe: Sally Bosken
Sara opened the session and thanked Donna Coletti, Sally Bosken, all of the technical support personnel, and Michael Blake.
Speaker:
Kevin Marvel from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) was with us via teleconference from Hawaii. Kevin gave a background report on what is happening with AAS journals. The University of Chicago is the publisher until 2008. At this point, AAS began searching for new publisher. Seven publishers were considered. After an extensive review, The Institute of Physics (IOP) was selected to be the new publisher. The editors were impressed with what IOP had to offer. The Astronomical Journal will be first one to transfer with the first issue to be published in January 2008. The Astrophysical Journal will be published by IOP beginning January 2009 and the Astrophysical Journal Letters will be transferred at a later date.
Changes happen, but the only change will be the publisher. There will be no change to archival access. During the transition, page charges will remain the same and so will subscriptions. The goal is that after transition, we will reduce our page charges and have a slight increase if any for subscriptions. Our basic goal will be to benefit astronomy and astrophysics; none of the proceeds of the journal come back to AAS. Funds will be rolled into technological development or back into our communities. IOP will try to add a watermark; it will be a nice technological addition. They anticipate that they will have print-on-demand versions of our journals. A patron could search for their publications and ask for it to be printed into one special print on demand book. It will be a nice advantage. Steve Moss and Jerry Cowie from IOP publishing were in attendance.
Q&A
1. Jane Holmquist: Who can we email with questions during the transition? At the bottom of the F.A.Q. page there are two e-mail addresses. What are the names of the real people? AAS is Kevin Marvel; all emails will go directly to him. For IOP, the email actually goes to the UK and they will pass it on Jerry Cowie from IOP
2. Molly White: What is the relationship between AAS and IOP? IOP will always have an individual route so that we can obtain our subscriptions. They will not make you buy a package. They have to make sure they print a high quality journal. All the other services we provide will follow. There will always be a way to subscribe to IOP journals individually without subscribing to a package or database.
3. Kevin Marvel thanked to the PAM representative who sits on the AAS board (Donna Coletti)
4. How did they publicize this change to the AAS members? A press release was sent. The AAS meeting was in progress; The January meeting will be in Austin, Texas. IOP will be there to talk to the scientists.
5. Kathleen Robertson: Where will the older files be stored? IOP will maintain the older archives but for now it will be directed; initially, it will give a new URL and a redirected URL.
6. Jane Holmquist: What is involved with a change like this for the publishers? Does the new publisher have to purchase the back files? It is complicated; guidelines come from ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers). We all must follow there rules; these guidelines are at the ALPSP website. We want to protect both authors and subscribers
7. Liz Bryson: IOP has a new PAM librarian liaison - her name is Susan Koskinen from University of California at Berkeley
8. Marsha Bishop: She is very concerned about page charges. IOP answers: IOP will be handling it and it should be seamless to you. Marsha now deals directly with UCP (University of Chicago Press). IOP answers: IOP will do whatever AAS asks us.
9. Molly White: She supervises someone who works on page charges. Currently IOP doesn’t handle page charges. She doesn’t want to make international calls to manage this. IOP will open a Washington D.C. office - or perhaps the Philadelphia office can help people. We want page charges handled smoothly.
10. Jane Holmquist: Is the European value added tax making a difference in the pricing? Is that why some people want the paper version? A: We will do what AAS says.
11. Donna C: How long will we still have print? They will have print on demand, but in 5 years we will probably go to on-line only. At Harvard, they are committed to keep the paper and will maintain the print as long as it is available. IOP responds that they do what AAS wants us to do.
12. Marsha Bishop: We have a large number of people who say they are willing to give up the paper copy of AJ.
New Topic: DOI
Digital object identifier. Emails circulated recently on this. Donna Coletti will put together responses and send them to PAMnet. Crossref needs DOI. Some publishers have done article numbering instead of page numbers or doi. IOP will adapt to whatever AAS desires. Librarians need to voice their views. Ruth Kneale stated that SPIE changed it last year and the engineers were very unhappy.
Donna C. says the APS incorporates a page number into their doi. One must have some standardized way to do this. Donna was expecting to hear much more about this. Astronomers expect to have a table of contents; that’s what scientists expect.
When an article goes up on the web as soon as it is ready – where does the TOC go? AGU has trouble with this. AAS will not repeat AGU’s error. Donna reminded librarians that Kevin really wants to hear from us. If we want page numbers we must say it now. There is a DOI resolver website so that people can find them.
Bob Michaelson said it would be good to pinpoint what is going on; why did the engineers dislike the AGU’s new system?
Donna asked for a show of hands: Do we care if AAS has page numbers? About half the people raised their hands. How much money do we want them to spend to solve this? No one responded.
Five years from now when we are all electronic, someone will want to reference an article that only has a DOI, but no page number. Will they be able to find it? AAS reminded us that they will imbed watermarks. If the DOI is wrong it will be very hard to find it if you don’t have a good citation. Please send Donna your concerns –
Jerry thanked PAM; he hoped that we will be happy with our work both collectively and in person.
At this point members introduced themselves.
Other issues:
1. Liz Bryson: At the APS website is a listing of core books in astronomy and a core list of physics and astronomy journals. Thanks to Madeleine Needles, Sally Bosken and Pam Yorks for help with this. There has been more input but more help is still needed; one more person is needed to help with astronomy books and another person is needed to help with the physics journals. If anyone is interested, please contact Pam or Liz. People have told Liz that they use this list and she gets positive feedback
2. Electronic vs free resources: Molly White: PhysMath Central (equivalent to Biomed central) is soliciting. The say there is a membership fee; the author pays for open access. Molly stated that she will not participate.
3. Yerkes observatory: Barbara Kern: All of the unique publications from the Yerkes collection have been moved to the campus this past year. Judy Bausch is retiring at the end of this month. There is a Yerkes study group, including faculty members who will come up with a plan for Yerkes. One idea was to sell the land to a developer for a spa; that fell through. Why did it close? Partially financial, most researchers are on campus. Also preservation issue since we are not sure of the plans for Yerkes. Approximately 8,000 duplicate library items will stay at Yerkes and become part of the Yerkes Observatory collection (not associated with University Library). The archives will be moved, including 2000 photos and glass plates; they will be digitalized by December 2007. They are pictures of people places and things, not astronomical plates. Judy initiated the Union List of Serials and received a PAM award for it. She was a visionary; the serials list hasn’t been updated but it is still great and is linked to Space Telescope Science Institute Library website.
4. Bob Noel asked if anyone was moving to charge back services. (i.e. charging individual departments) – Christina Pikas at APL said yes, they have been charging for their time for years, but they don’t charge fees for databases searches such as Dialog. Also they only charge if it is over one hour. Bob states that his higher ups have hinted at it. Does anyone charge for ILL? No one. Kathleen Robertson previously worked at a place that charged back all searching fees. Pam Yorks said that is the corporate model and we don’t do that.
5. Molly White: – Are there any institutional repositories that are archiving actual raw data [for astronomers or other academics]? At Indiana the I.T. people who are administering Indiana's repository weren't ready to accommodate a data collection request.
6. Donna Coletti: LISA 5 had a remaining balance of $10,000. SLA will hold the funds. For future meetings the funds will be split between 40% for Friends of LISA and 60 % for the use of the planning committee.
7. Joe Murphy is going to do a wiki specifically designed for learning PAM. It will be posted on PAMnet.
SLA/PAM Astronomy roundtable part 2 June 6, 2007 1300 - 1430.
Speakers:
1. International Year of Astronomy 2009
Liz Bryson talked about the aims of this effort and what's going on. This commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileo using the telescope. Apparently they hadn't even considered including astronomy librarians in the planning. The primary American contact is AAS. Liz will make sure our voices are heard. More information on the web site http://www.astronomy2009.org
2. Pete Banholzer: Status of library at NASA Goddard
Reports of their death were exaggerated! Library (selected as Federal library of the year in 2002) has a broadly based
science and engineering collection. In 2005 the Goddard Space Flight Center director said the library was an unaffordable luxury. Head of the library, Robin Dixon does a great job of making upper management understand libraries but serious thinking about actually closing library began in Jan 2007. Preparation was begun - Robin said to recall all books that were in circulation.Money was scrapped up to fund library through the end of January. The "Library Rebase Committee" recommended they reduce physical footprint of the library by 50% and cut the staff by 40%. The facilities management people say it is going to cost lots more than the committee thought to reconstruct the space and put offices in.
Q&A - what will they do with the books? 1500 boxes currently stored; don't know yet what they are going to do with the material.
Other horror stories - Ames - drastically reducing library space. They put dumpsters in front of the library and threw things in; the federal employee union was concerned about waste of federal money and negotiated a budget freeze. Now have a study going on to have a virtual unified NASA library.
3. How do you get people to interact with the library? Food, "new books" shelf - real and virtual.
Pat Viele - at Cornell she meets with faculty and talks about serials crisis, they have a links to library issues on their website; she will send link on scholarly communication issues to PAMnet.
Molly White - Univ of Texas faculty say they don't come to the library anymore; grad students are the heaviest users.
Donna Coelti - every year they have an annual grad student/ post docs tea in the library - free giveaways
Christina Pikas - lets them eat lunch
Sally Bosken - eat lunch in the library and once a month cake day.
Pam Yorks - have had complaints about their food policy - and they don't let people
Princeton - no food
Florida has given up - people had pizza parties, they pass out drinks coasters.
4.. Discussion of new research trends in astronomy - how can we better support the astronomers.
Christina Pikas: with the shortfall in funding for unmanned space missions, there's a new trend to data mine existing datasets. This came up at a recent ASIS&T meeting. Are libraries here supporting this?
Barbara Kern says that Chicago and Johns Hopkins are working to digitalize the old Sloan sky survey.
Jill said Google Sky is interested in large dataset and will put it on hard drives They are using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and will allow you to browse constellations and other things.
5. Robert Fowler - are you doing electronic dissertations of your students?
Kathleen Robertson bought digital rights from ProQuest for their dissertations. Caltech and U of Wash bought theirs and public access. UT is requiring electronic versions; but they don't require students to submit their dissertations to UMI. Berkeley has current dissertations at Berkley and ProQuests digital dissertations. Scripps oceanographic is urging their students to submit public versions
6. Sara Russell Gonzalez said that the ALA "Guide to Reference" is coming out next month. If you have any suggestions for astronomy reference soruces, please contact her.
Meeting adjourned!
