Welcoming HighWire as an OASPA member – OASPA
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Category Archives: oa.highwire
The Future State of Our Scholarly Publishing Vendors – The Scholarly Kitchen
“One of the benefits of moving to a commercial publisher is that you no longer have to manage (or directly pay for) vendor services — typesetting, copyediting, online hosting, enhancement features, metadata maintenance, printing, distribution, manuscript submission and review systems, sales support, etc. Further, due to the efficiencies of scale, the commercial publishers are paying less for these services than independent societies. Having recently transitioned a program from self-published to commercially published, I can tell you that this is 100% the case.
What does all of this mean for the vendor landscape? We have seen several examples of consolidation or the outright purchase of vendors and services by commercial publishers:
Atypon to Wiley
Aries to Elsevier
eJournalPress to Wiley
J&J Editorial to Wiley…
HighWire (now owned by MPS) was built in response to society publishers needing an online home for their journals. Unencumbered by the needs of a Wiley or an Elsevier, HighWire was an early partner with Google and had tight relationships with the library community. HighWire was exactly why many society publishers could stay independent during the tumultuous move to online journals.
But again, is there space for a new “HighWire”? What are the incentives of innovation when more and more journals are consolidated under very few publishing houses? Without a customer base, there is no investment. A new entrant will find it very difficult to build enough support to justify financial investors. And without that growth, likelihood of being acquired is low.
Even if you build a better mousetrap, if there are no customers, you won’t get very far. The barrier to entry for any new player seems nearly impossible. This is not good for any industry and makes us particularly vulnerable to disruptors outside our space….”
JCORE upgrades to JATS 1.3 – Highwire Press
“HighWire’s journals hosting solution JCORE can now transform XML to industry standard Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) XML version 1.3, the latest version. This means that publishers using the platform can now seamlessly comply with the specifications of this interoperable standard.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is the first JCORE publisher to offer the JATS 1.3 download for all of their OA content which includes over 57,000 articles. This option may be attractive to BMJ and other publishers as the ability to download full text in a machine readable format is one of the strong recommendations made by Coalition S within the Plan S Principles and Implementation guidance for publishers. …”
HighWire at 25: John Sack looks back – Highwire Press
“In the early 90s I began to work with Mike Keller, the co-founder of HighWire and head of Stanford University’s libraries. The ‘serials crisis’ was a growing concern for institutes and libraries, and Mike thought web-based journals might hold a potential key to the challenge.
Of course, to get things off the ground we needed to work with a journal publisher who was willing to take the risk on a new and broadly untested technology. At its heart, the HighWire origin story is about several non-profit publishers and societies who took the chance and took that risk to explore a completely new model of publishing. The hope was that the web could help to solve some of the problems hindering research: rigid formatting, rising costs, and lack of speed. Of course, from our perspective now, the dial-up internet of the early 90s looks painfully slow! (Our early interfaces to the all-important figures in the literature used three levels of detail, just to conserve bandwidth. But in some fields the figures were the point! For example, in a physics paper, figures were used to convey equations and a paper without its equations was like a sentence without verbs and nouns.) But it was a huge step forward from the traditional way of doing things.
We worked with students in Stanford’s Computer Science department to partner with the leadership of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, together designing what would become the industry-standard for delivering web-based scholarly articles, issues and journals. This led to the birth, 25 years ago (see References), of JBC Online – which we then demoed at the Society’s annual meeting in May 1995….”
HighWire at 25: Richard Sever (bioRxiv) looks back – Highwire Press
“10 years later I ended up working at Cold Spring Harbor myself, and continuing my relationship with HighWire from a new perspective. The arXiv preprint server for physics had launched in 1991, and my colleague John Inglis and I had often talked about whether we could do something similar for biology. I remember saying we could put together some of HighWire’s existing components, adapt them in certain ways and build something that would function as a really effective preprint server—and that’s what we did, launching bioRxiv in 2013. It was great then to be able to take that experiment to HighWire meetings to report back on. Initially there was quite a bit of skepticism from the community, who thought there were cultural barriers that meant preprints wouldn’t work well for biology, but 7 years and almost 100,000 papers later it’s still there, and still being served very well by HighWire.
When we launched bioRxiv we made it very explicit that we would not take clinical work, or anything involving patients. But the exponential growth of submissions to bioRxiv demonstrated that there was a demand and a desire for this amongst the biomedical community, and people were beginning to suggest that a similar model be trialed for medicine. A tipping point for me was an OpEd in the New York Times (Don’t Delay News of Medical Breakthroughs, 2015) by Eric Topol (Scripps Research) and Harlan Krumholz (Yale University), who would go on to become a co-founder of medRxiv….”
HighWire at 25: Anurag Acharya (Google Scholar) looks back – Highwire Press
“In the early 2000s, my role at Google was running web indexing: the system that crawls the web, making pages and content discoverable and accessible through search. Nowadays, there’s an assumption that looking for something via Google searches everything, but that wasn’t the case in the early days. Part of my role was to expand the index by reaching out to many different types of organizations – government, business, publishers – to make sure their web sites were included in the index.
A key group among these was scholarly publishers hosting journals and conferences. Having grown up on a university campus, scholarly articles had been all around and I wanted to make sure that they were as easy to find as everything else.
As a part of this, I reached out to HighWire to explore the possibility of indexing the hosted journals. I remember our first call in the Fall of 2002 with John Sack, Todd McGee and several others. A few quick calls, a couple of meetings in person and we were off….”
HighWire at 25: David Worlock looks back – Highwire Press
“So we emerge into the world of AI. In fact of course it has been with us all along, changing its name from ‘Expert systems’ to ‘neural networks’ as a way of disguising the fact that it didn’t deliver to our wildest expectations. Now that it is finally beginning to deliver, it can shoulder many duties for scholarly research. All that peer-review reference checking and concept analysis, for example. But these are the foothills. It is when AI becomes the way that researchers read other people’s research that things really get interesting. Released from the time-consuming literature, researchers may be free to research and self-publish. But acts of self-publishing may simply be releasing formatted work into the network, or opening access to the network for a digital lab notebook. Imagine Jupyter notebooks of the future where colleagues and collaborators could see and annotate ?ndings, or test reproducibility from the data available on board? As we move from Open Access to Open Science, overt acts of ‘publishing’ may become as rare as overt acts of textual reading. The minds of librarians (e.g. Hypergraph from Liberate Science) already lean in this direction….”
HighWire at 25: Todd McGee looks back – Highwire Press
“Last week saw HighWire’s 25th anniversary, a huge milestone in our history. Founded by Stanford University during the early days of the web, HighWire pioneered the online revolution in scholarly publishing.
Since then, our world has transformed beyond recognition and our industry is facing disruption like never before. In the last year, we’ve all had to come to grips with the “new normal”, exploring new ways of doing, sharing and publishing science and research more rapidly and more collaboratively than ever before.
In this blog post, Todd McGee, Vice President of Research, Development and Operations at HighWire, gives us some insight into the early days of HighWire and how he got involved. …”
HighWire at 25: Todd McGee looks back – Highwire Press
“Last week saw HighWire’s 25th anniversary, a huge milestone in our history. Founded by Stanford University during the early days of the web, HighWire pioneered the online revolution in scholarly publishing.
Since then, our world has transformed beyond recognition and our industry is facing disruption like never before. In the last year, we’ve all had to come to grips with the “new normal”, exploring new ways of doing, sharing and publishing science and research more rapidly and more collaboratively than ever before.
In this blog post, Todd McGee, Vice President of Research, Development and Operations at HighWire, gives us some insight into the early days of HighWire and how he got involved. …”
Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press
“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar. CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.
How does it work?
When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution. This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location. Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”
Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press
“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar. CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.
How does it work?
When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution. This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location. Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”
Plan S: HighWire whitepaper explores the options publishers are considering – Highwire Press
“When we launched HighWire back in 1995, the Internet was transforming the way academic research content was developed, hosted and communicated. It was an exciting time. The rapidly accelerating digital era brought published content to international research communities in an instant. This was access like never before….
Plan S has invigorated the most active debate since the proposal of “ebiomed” and PubMed Central about 20 years ago. How will publishers achieve Open Access compliance? What are the main questions and concerns publishers and journals have? And what could genuine solutions be, based on what we currently know? …
Bringing the HighWire community together over the course of 4 months, we were able to identify and explore 14 implementation options for publishers and how they could deliver against the ten principles as set out by cOAlition S. This whitepaper summarizes the findings and details the 4 most preferred options….”
Plan S: HighWire whitepaper explores the options publishers are considering – Highwire Press
“When we launched HighWire back in 1995, the Internet was transforming the way academic research content was developed, hosted and communicated. It was an exciting time. The rapidly accelerating digital era brought published content to international research communities in an instant. This was access like never before….
Plan S has invigorated the most active debate since the proposal of “ebiomed” and PubMed Central about 20 years ago. How will publishers achieve Open Access compliance? What are the main questions and concerns publishers and journals have? And what could genuine solutions be, based on what we currently know? …
Bringing the HighWire community together over the course of 4 months, we were able to identify and explore 14 implementation options for publishers and how they could deliver against the ten principles as set out by cOAlition S. This whitepaper summarizes the findings and details the 4 most preferred options….”
Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) – Collaborating toward the shared goal of systems interoperability – info@manuscriptexchange.org
“Authors lose time and effort when their manuscript is rejected by a journal and they have to repeat the submission process in subsequent journals. Plus, it is estimated that 15 million hours of researcher time is wasted each year repeating reviews. Both of these challenges could be addressed if journals and publishers could transfer manuscripts between publications using different submission-tracking systems. With the growth of cascading workflows, manuscripts are regularly transferred within a publishing group. But a growing challenge is to transfer the manuscript (and, optionally, peer-review data) across publishers and manuscript systems and even to and from preprint servers.
A group of manuscript-management suppliers has taken up this challenge and is working together with NISO to develop a common approach that can be adopted across the industry. …”
HighWire co-founder leads industry initiative on manuscript exchange | HighWire
“Members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the ‘Manuscript Exchange Common Approach’ (MECA) – a major new academic publishing initiative co-led by HighWire Founding Director John Sack. The project will see the industry’s leading technology providers work together on a more standardized approach to the transfer of manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those in use at publishers and preprint servers….
Momentum has gathered pace since the project was first presented by John at the 2017 SSP Annual Meeting, with the first use case for the project now live….”