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After a general overview of one of the
organizers, who has played a key role in various aspects of information
exchange, several representatives discuss future plans of their publications:
K.B. Marvel presents the AAS journals (ApJ parts I and II, ApJS, AJ, which are
just being transferred from the University of Chicago Press to Institute of
Physics Publishing). P. Murdin represents the RAS and its main journal, the
MNRAS.
"Open Access'' is
of course one of the key words of this conference. Producing a journal (either
on paper or electronically) is expensive. For the AAS journals, these costs are
shared between authors andsubscribers. Future plans are to abandon "paper
copies'' at all, although "printable pages'' will continue to be provided. For
MNRAS, it is the subscribers who pay. And if it would have "open access'',
authors would have to be charged for publication.Some research funding agencies
demand that scientific results that they have sponsored should appear online,
and freely available (at least after a certaintime). Various approaches were
outlined by representatives of publishers (Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Elsevier,
EDP Sciences). S. Plaszczynski introduced a project for "open access'' in the
field of high energy physics. To replace "repositories'' and collections of
"preprints'' that may have never made it to the pages of journals for various
reasons, a SCOAP model was initiated. This "Sponsoring Consortium for Open
Access Publishing in Particle Physics'' will be a global network of funding
agencies, laboratories and libraries that will provide the necessary funding
for publishing material in the main journals for high energy physics (involving
four publishers). M. Kurtz outlined the "Open access policy'' of
Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), while T. Mahoney voiced some
caution, since open access may lead to a deterioration or even collapse of the
publication process. W. B. Burton and H. A. Abt discussed long-term trends in
research literature, while C. Madsen and L. L. Christensen discussed aspects of
communication of specialists with politicians and the public.
We could only give a brief summary of this
book. Many thought-provoking ideas simply defied being abstracted. Anyone who
is interested in the publication process in astronomy and its aspects in the
future will find a lot of interesting reading in these
proceedings.
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