Publishing in the digital age

A conference on the future of scientific publishing will held on Saturday, Nov. 12. Speakers at the all-day conference, beginning at 8:30 a.m. at Sinclair Auditorium, include a number of experts with first-hand involvement in scientific publishing. They will present a spectrum of views on the challenges and issues the industry faces in the digital age.
The conference, sponsored by the Lehigh University Library and Technology Services and the Lehigh University Chapter of Sigma Xi, is aimed at users and producers of scientific and technical scholarship. Sigma Xi is the international honor society of science and engineering, which was founded in 1886 to encourage appreciation and support of original work in science and technology.
Speakers at the conference include:
• Julia Blixrud, assistant director for public programs for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), who will address “Advancing Open Access for the Public Good.” Blixrud is currently implementing a grassroots educational and advocacy program for the SPARC directed to scientists and scholars, librarians, and society publishers. Her work and research focuses on technical standards, serials, cooperative programs, intellectual property, and scholarly communication.
• John Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society, who will present “Scholarly Publishing: A Century Ago, a Century from Now.” In his role, Ewing oversees the annual production of a dozen journals, more than 100 new books, and the maintenance of a print library of more than 3,000 titles. The AMS also maintains the electronic database MathSciNet, which contains more than two million mathematical reviews dating back to 1940 that are used by researchers around the world.
• Karen Hunter, senior vice president of Elsevier New York, whose presentation is entitled “Publishing in a Period of ‘Unprecedented Uncertainty.” Hunter’s expertise includes the migration of research from print to electronic and has specialized in the research library market and in policies affecting that market.
• Rosalind Reid, editor for American Scientist, who will present “Publishing, Access and the Progress of Science.” As editor of the magazine since 1992, Reid launched an online archive for developing-country scientists in addition to the illustrated American Scientist Online.
• Christine Roysdon and Brian Simboli of Lehigh University Libraries, who will give a lecture entitled “Whose Electronic Library Is It, Anyway?” Roysdon, director of Library Collections and Systems, oversees the development of Lehigh's electronic library collections, campuswide software licenses, digital library projects, library systems, and library electronic services. Simboli, science librarian for Lehigh University Library and Technology Services, is responsible for library collection development and services to faculty and students in sciences, mathematics, and psychology.
--Andrea Tulcin