Comments on the library and information science world
Yesterday I tried to follow a link from Twitter -courtesy to Janneke Staaks- to a reading suggestion. To na avail. It was a useful reading tip to an article on ScienceDirect. Well…. on a mobile phone with network access from a commercial operator that’s not going to work. Not yet, at least. So Elsevier and other publishers, are you ready for the mobile Web yet?
The last couple of days I had the pleasure to attend the Elsevier Development Partners meeting. The exact products they are working on might be of interest to some people, but that’s up to Elsevier to announce. But what was really the big surprise at this meeting -which lasted 3 days- was the tone from Elsevier. It was all about open Science. They clearly wanted to open up. There was a lot of talk about sharing information, making mash-ups possible, Application programming Interfaces (API). Elsevier Science wanted to move away from the double barred information silo to become an open solution provider in the scholarly world. If Elsevier is thinking and acting in this direction, then change will become a major issue for the entire scientific publishing industry and that is good news for libraries who want to remain a vital service in the future as well.
This change will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But Raphael Sidi just announced the other day on his blog the Elsevier Article API at the programmable Web. So, Elsevier is not only talking, they are acting up on it as well.
Let other publishers follow this example!
Two weeks ago we were forewarned that Wiley would integrate all the content of the Blackwell Synergy on Wiley InterScience platform. It would only disrupt the service of the systems over the weekend of June 28-29. When I received this notification I thought immediately about Péter’s picks&pans (2007) where he investigated the capabilities of both platforms.
Just a few quotes from his review:
A merger of the Blackwell Synergy and the Wiley Interscience collections using the software of the latter would certainly not produce Synergy. On the contrary, the serious software deficiencies om Interscience would weaken performance and functionality of Blackwell Synergy, which uses the excellent Atypon software.
[Synergy] This is a very well-designed system enhanced by complementary information – as you should expect these days.
Wiley made no efforts to improve its software. The software keeps fooling itself and the searchers by offering dysfunctional and nonsense options.
It is a severe sign of dementia when people do not recognize their own name. So is the syndrome that Wiley keeps listing some of its very own journal some of the time under the label “Cited Articles available from other publishers” and/or keeps ignoring them in the citation tracking.
In a subsequent chat with our serials librarian, he indicated that he preferred the Blackwell Synergy platform behind the scenes much more that the Wiley InterScience platform. From my own viewpoint, I regretted this move as well, since Blackwell was already Counter compliant for quite some time and the Counter reports have been audited as well, whereas Wiley Synergy was and still is not Counter compliant. That is a very serious shortcoming for one a the largest scientific publishing houses.
So users had something too loose in ease of use possibilities and librarians as well after this announcement of abandoning the Synergy platform.
What was intended to take only a mere weekend, has continued for a whole week. All Dutch university libraries faced problems with access to both Wiley and Blackwell journals. We have to sit and wait and see if the problems have been resolved during this weekend. Meanwhile I find it disappointing that Wiley makes no mention of these problems on their transition page.
Facing these problems I can only pay a compliment to Péter who foresaw what was coming up on us in March 2007 already. “A merger of the Blackwell Synergy and the Wiley Interscience collections using the software of the latter would certainly not produce Synergy”.
Reference
Jacsó́, P. (2007). SpringerLink, Blackwell Synergy, Wiley InterScience. Online(Jul/Aug 2007): 49-51. http://www.jacso.info/PDFs/jacso-springerlink-blackwell-wiley.pdf
The photo in the header is the street where we live. You can actually see our house, it is behind the completely brown cow. An old brick house, in a row of 4 houses, built in 1931 or thereabout. The photo has been taken from the floodplains of the Rhine. These are flooded on a regular basis. Between the cows and the street there is a small water which a kind of artificial creek.
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