Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting
| Pages | 15-22 |
| Published date | 10 July 2007 |
| Date | 10 July 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050710823283 |
| Author | Julia Gelfand |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP)
Annual Meeting
Julia Gelfand
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 6 2007, pp. 15-22, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050710823283 15
Held June 6-8, 2007 in San
Francisco, the Society of Scholarly
Publishing (SSP) was one of the most
successful annual conferences in recent
history for this group. Clearly it has
almost outgrown modest hotel space
and requires either much larger rooms or
more concurrent sessions to meet the
growing expectations. This kind of
success clearly gave off a very positive
sense about the conference, the
organization and the new ideas that were
being shared.
The theme of this year’s SSP meeting
was ‘‘Imagining the Future: Scholarly
Communication 2.0’’. More than 700
persons, and lots of young people too,
attended making this the largest SSP
meeting ever. It was reported that 12 per
cent of the attendees were from outside
of the USA which really defines this
meeting as international. About 14 per
cent of the registrants were librarians
which was also a very high showing.
Due to the differentiated registration
rates, librarians are more able to afford
this meeting than when they had to pay
the high rates common at publishing
meetings. There were many more
exhibitors than in the past, reflecting the
changes in publishing technologies and
printing, new partnerships needed to
sustain the industry and the evolving
relationships for service. The logistics
were great, except that due to the high
registration, rooms were oversubscribed
and some sessions were a bit
uncomfortable. Eventually all the 2007
conference presentations will be posted
on the SSP website at www.sspnet.org/
The opening keynote address was
delivered by Larry Sanger, known as
the founder of the Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.com) and now the
leader of Citizendium (see http://
en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page)
which uses wiki technologies and
applications. A philosopher by training
the paradox he shared is that he has little
familiarity with academic publishing but
he is committed to a vision for providing
reliable information over the next 10-20
years exercising the following criteria:
.continuing to develop free encyclo-
pedia projects;
.promotes collaboration and articles
or entries are developed collabora-
tively;
.general public is invited to
participate;
.having sustainable business
models;
.introducing new project ideas that
are free, vetted and reliable;
.currently there are 1,700 authors,
240 editors, 2,000 articles and it is
expected that thousands of articles
will be released in a few years.
Sanger said that he assumed that the
large library digitization projects were
going along brilliantly and would have
full-text searching potential as well as
potential for archiving. The new
projects he envisions are all global
collaborations with two practical quests
– to get humanity from here to there and
to use academic guidance and products
to steer it – the example of products he
noted was the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy which was launched in 1995
(see http://plato.stanford.edu/).
In 2000, he launched the Nupedia and
it withered away due to a cumbersome
and slow product ion process but lots was
learned from the experience. Then in
2001, wikis were adopted as the tools of
choice for content development and the
Wikipedia was born with no editors and
remains of questionable reputation
except that usage continues to skyrocket
each month. In 2005, the Encyclopedia
of Earth (see www.eoearth.org/eoe/
about) was launched with signed articles
but not assigned; other criteria required
the author to have expertisein the area or
topic about what they were writing; not
so much collaboration takes place and
aggregates data from sources. The
Scholarpedia wa s born in 2006 (see
www.scholarpedia.org/) and it is more
like an encyclopedia of computational
science covering topics in neuroscience,
mathematics and computer science. Free
to read and all writers/reviewers are
experts.
This all leads up to the grandest
experiment yet – the Encyclopedia of
Life. In 2017, he hopes to release the
Encyclopedia of Life – there will soon
be an announcement that $100 million
in grants will be available for
development. In the meantime, his work
with Citizendium which is a wikipedia
with editors building a ‘‘compendium
about everything’’ and eventually it may
take on the ‘‘encyclopedic label’’ but
only when the editors are satisfied that
the model and product is something
indeed special and different than
anything else out there.
What can we all learn from these
projects? According to Sanger, the
stipulated goals are for both quantity
and quality to be equally important and
the community of collaboration has to
be central. What are the lessons learned
.There are production issues related
to speed of growth – recommend to
grow slow and accelerate.
.Distinguish among contributors –
some experts have name recogni-
tion.
.Expand the base of contributors as
widely as is reasonable.
.Not necessary to sign articles.
.Discourage personal control.
.Using an open content license
creates a more dynamic commu-
nication pattern.
.Wiki allows for greatest
functionality.
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