The Future of Research Information

Presentation by Karen Philips, Editorial Director, SAGE Publications as part of Coalition for Social Science Libraries Study Day, British Library, February 17 2011.

Emphasises that publishers don't control this area; she's just giving her perspective.

• Growth of research investment

  • Global R&D expenditure increased $520bn - $1100bn 1996 – 2007.

  • Decrease in US, Europe; big increase in Asia/Pacific, small increase in rest of world.

• Geographical & disciplinary spread

  • EU and US still dominate STEM publication (esp. US dominating 'high-impact' publication) but Asia is rising much faster.

  • Social Sciences non-existant in China/Russia/Poland.. even in US/UK, maxes out at 10-12%.

• Research output

  • 3.5% pa increase in quantity of research articles published

  • Growth in number of journals likely to slow down

    • Libraries have no money to buy new titles

    • One Oxford colleague was very withering about site licences, big journal packs, and so on, noting that libraries are unable to assess individual titles for value anyway, when what we pay is based on College cancellations, and not how much we value the research!

  • Thus: increasingly competitive to get published

• Role & funding of library

  • We're becoming online information guides; moving away from subject specialism and into more general information-literacy-providers; enabling researchers to become their own subject-specialists!

• New models of publishing & product types

  • Open access – alternative/additional, not a replacement. (She would say that.)

  • Focusses on growth of Gold OA (8% of all pubs, apparently!)

  • Bluffs out of questions on Green OA.

  • Plugs SageOpen – a new, cheap, author-pays journal for the Social Sciences.

  • Space for a cross between a monograph and an article; products combining 'journal' content and 'book' content – eg Springer Briefs – concise summaries of cutting-edge research.

  • Plugs SAGE Research Methods Online – encyclopedia, dictionary, book, journal content all brought together on research methods topics.

• Changes in technology (Serving us – we don't serve technological change)

  • Improved accessibility / discoverability / functionality

  • Social elements – commenting, blogging, community-building

  • Plugs Methodspace, Social Science Space – free SAGE-run social media sites, full of postgrad students, some academics, very global discussion.

  • Semantic web