The appliance to science

Bobby Pickering spoke to a range of major scientific information suppliers about the technological trends

On one thing, most scientific, technical and medical (STM) suppliers are agreed: the move from print to online usage of their journals and book titles has dramatically changed them as publishers.

"Online usage has grown rapidly," says Gavin Swanson, editorial manager for STM journals at CambridgeUniversity Press. For some there is a sense that a new era has dawned.

David Hoole, head of brand marketing and content licensing at Nature Publishing Group (NPG) says: "The long-expected transition of print to electronic distribution is near complete. But now the wealth of opportunities offered by the web is becoming clear. Scholarly communication is now primarily online, and we have only just begun to glimpse the potential."

MORE RELAXED APPROACH
STM suppliers are also displaying a more relaxed attitude to the threat of Google Scholar and Wikipedia.

CUP's Swanson says: "I don't view either of these as potentially any more disruptive than any other innovations that have emerged as the web matures.

"Rather, they each have their own valuable contribution to make. The key point for scholarly research is the validation process: how can a researcher be certain that whatever he or she is reading carries the authority of an item of record?"

NPG's Hoole sums up a widely expressed belief that both could be beneficial: "Google has vastly increased the discoverability of publisher content, and Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of participative publishing."

Karen Abramson, president and CEO of Ovid, the Wolters Kluwer subsidiary, says Google's accessibility and drive to innovate could make it a major player in scholarly research: "What's missing from the Google formula is what defines Ovid's value proposition: precision search and discovery."

Victor Camlek, director of market intelligence at Thomson Scientific, says: "Google Scholar has raised the profile of research information and contributed to an almost 100% increase in ISIWeb of Knowledge usage. Wikipedia can also support scholarly research by promoting collaboration, group authoring, and content management."

Others also point to inherent Google weaknesses. Stephen Barr,MD of Sage Publications says: "The limitation of Google lies in the fact that retrieved results are prioritised according to relevance to the keywords searched rather than the quality of information and its significance to the field of interest.

"Wikipedia provides more information, but users still have to make their own quality assessment – which is timeconsuming and not so easy to do."

And Rainer Stuike-Prill, VP for marketing and sales at FIZ Karlsruhe, points to Google's lack of information quality standards in "completeness, reliability, and availability".

He says: "The business model of Google is based on advertising and not focused on providing business critical information."

Suppliers are also investing in Web 2.0. Springer has created MySpringerlink personalisation features which include saved searches, RSS feeds of searches, saved articles and eBooks.

Ovid has introduced rich, Ajax user interface elements as part of Books@Ovid to improve the experience of reading books online.

Ovid's Abramson thinks that a "compelling trend" in its early stages is the idea that "collective intelligence" can be more authoritative than "expert intelligence". She says: "Aspects of "mass" social tagging, blog commenting and wiki editing could have a profound effect on science information. The traditional peer-reviewmodel could be challenged in unprecedented ways."

Abramson believes new technology leveraging "collective intelligence" could create a dynamic new world where communities of users can help to filter, sort and expose the highest quality of content for users.