Official Description:

Global Exposure: New and Emerging Models and Strategies from Bangkok, Tokyo, Seattle, and Brooklyn

Dan Tonkery, Vice President of Business Development, EBSCO Information Services, Moderator
John Burns, Manager, eBook Conversion & Creation Technologies, Amazon.com (cancelled participation)
Pote N. Lee, Chairman, iGroup
Asako Omi, cofounder, J-STAGE
Bob Stein, Director, Institute for the Future of the Book

Marketing and technology innovations occur at the edges, where societies meet and industries collide. And disruptive technologies often breed best in the slip-stream of traditional R&D activity. In this session we'll look at some inventive and influential activities from the "off ramp" side of scholarly publishing, including new trade routes in Asia from the perspective of a multi-national information provider, the development of a nationally supported infrastructure for the publishing and archiving of e-journals in Japan, novel technologies being incubated at Amazon that will take us beyond Search-Inside-the-Book, and a powerful and transformative open source authoring system, called Sophie, from a small band of researchers on the East River.

My Live Blogging Notes (Society for Scholarly Publishing, Top Management Roundtable):

Dan Tonkery of EBSCO opens with a few slides from his recent overseas travels (China and Korea specifically) discussing global exposure and the "appetite for information". Expectation that there will be a forthcoming volume of papers of increasing quality from these institutions. He notes that overseas libraries are better at marketing their resources as gauged by the display of posters and advertiseements directing users to the appropriate tool/service/product. Awareness of the Thomson Scientific journal impact factor as a metric for productivity and publication. Awareness of open-access as well. STM information worldwide is generating high volume activity. Dan predicts a major sea-change coming out of the Asia Pacific region.

Pote Lee, iGroup

Overview of the Asia Pacific marketplace and iGroup's approach to that market, the challenges, the trends and the solutions. Lee's background is as an engineer and he is the chair of iGroup, representing publishers overseas in this market. Employee base of 400 serves academic and corporate institutions.

Overview

Asia is very broad geographical region, highly diverse in a variety of ways -- linguistically (with multiple dialects even within a specific nation), religious, political, cultural differences do exist throughout. Economically Asia Pacific region has a variety of economies (Aus, NZ, Japan are high income nations; China and Korea qualify as middle income, etc.) Main market is the academic institution. Research institutions are less common in that region and corporate customer base is further behind (although starting to pick up). His personal view is that India will be the most important market in another five-ten years, surpassing the levels of China at the present time.

Only a few nations have official formal consortia management entities; iGroup has found it useful in certain locations to establish "virtual consortia" in areas where the concept is not widespread. The idea of a consortia differs with regard to negotiations and fee-structures. Demanding environment -- vendors may have to negotiate for purchases that are only hovering at the thousand dollar mark (very different from experience with Western library consortia).

Infrastructure in Japan is very robust; other countries' infrastructure are less so. In China for example ISPs are actually operated in large part by the government. Speed of access may be significantly slower because the infrastructures may be limited in what they can handle.

His organization advises customer base in what publications may be most useful to them, depending upon national priorities. They also do training on the various resources. Translate manuals into the local languages. Support for information literacy and usage is key in these markets as is offering various forms of professional development and continuing education for the library and information professionals. The range of library budgets also requires that his organization provide technological support for library automation.

Challenges faced? Only 3-5% are actually buying due to budgetary constraints so growing the revenue requires an ongoing commitment on the part of both vendor and publisher.

Asako Omi, Professor, Tokai University

J-Stage Japan Science and Technology Information Agregator, Electronic. Used by 380 academic societies. 330 journals, 98 conference proceedings, 200,000 articles. 450,000 downloads per month. The aim is dissemination of journal content from Japanese academic societies. All abstracts are free. Full Text access is controlled by individual participating publishers (access/authentication controls are in place). Language demands: Abstracts English 62% 48% for journals. Also mix of English and Japanese publications. 57% of the articles on the platform are accessible w/o charge. The disciplines covered span the spectrum of disciplines.

JST LInk Center (subsystem of JStage) enables linking between e-journals and bibliographic databases. Cross Ref Chemport STN PubMed Google (lots of traffic in referrals) PubMed appears to be the largest and most important referralsource. More than half of the traffic is directed to JST from standard A&I services.

Moving to add new functions (alerts when article is cited; and COUNTER compliance)

JSTAGE has Journal @rchive. Full text pdfs from major journals published in Japan. Expect to cover 500 titles in five years. All abstractsand most full text content available for free. Use the archive to make Japanese intellectual heritage more visible and attract youth to the various scientific-tech professions. Content dates back as far as the 1880's.

Japan has focused on developing their science and technology policy over the past ten years and will continue over the course of the next five. Increasing allocation of government funding to the sciences and preserved even in periods of economic constraints in other forms of government funding. Hope to achieve more efficient and effective management of government R&D and break-up any existing institutional or operational bottlenecks.

Mission is promotion of R&D from basic research to commercialization w/ particular emphasison the creation of new technology and (2) to improve infrastructure. Hence the importance of these STM information activities.

Live demo of Journal @rchive

Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book

Locating a book inside of a network is a critical activity. Without Gods: Towards a history of atheism. Author is thinking out his process online at his blog and the readers of his blog are becoming collaborators in the development of his text. This is one way of increasing value and visibility of the text.

Author of the Hacker Manifesto has a new book two-thirds completed and wanted to put it online. He writes in paragraphs, sections, chapters and wanted input (comments and other forms of annotation) to display in parallel with his text. Comments may appear even as you are reading online, giving a sense that the book is alive.

Two experiments in moving the book from a less static form to a more fluid form of discursive process.

References a work from the '90's in which he was involved where the creator was introducing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" to audience (musical concepts, scoring displayed as music is played, instruments separated out from full work) It was a linear process and the original creator was leftout of the process and ever since Stein has wanted "to create an authoring environment that would allow creative people to assemble robust and elegant documents without having to resort to extensive programming. (Hence Sophie) Tool uses what appears to be Ajax technology to drag and drop modular elements of the work (text, images, etc.) Done in small talk which is an object-oriented language. Demos mechanism for going to a url to pick up a video clip (not housed on his machine) and embed that element into the page of the book for subsequent users. Sophisticated layout of elements on the page. Clickng on word in page launches music and/or a timeline. Teachers and students in higher education will have the means whereby they can express ideas in new ways. Document is created in an XML format so with some limited intervention Google will be able to index the content published in this format.