Academic publishing is electronic publishing

Derk Haank began by saying that he wanted to keep his presentation simple and would make only a few statements. The first of these was to say that, although it might be stating the obvious, academic publishing is electronic publishing. It has been remarkable how quickly things have progressed since the invention of the Web, and an EC study recently recognised that the revolution in electronic publishing has had a significant impact on the landscape of academic publishing. Haank sees this as a good development, as previous evaluations had compared the new, bright electronic future with the current state – and the current state was that of 1995 when we were at the end of the serials crisis with ever higher unit prices for single journals. Much has changed and improved since then, and though there is a lot more change to come what can be seen now is a lot better than before, when only paper was used. According to Haank there can be no debate as to whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. It is definitely half-full. This is not because he is a born optimist, but because we are just at the beginning. In fact he hopes it’s only a quarter full, because that would mean there is a lot more to come. We must move beyond the present position, and we will move beyond it. There is no shortage of thinkers who can describe the new frontiers. Haank has worked amongst them for the last 20 years. There are a lot of people who can describe how things will look in ten years’ time, but there are actually very few people who can manage the migration to fully working databases. It has been no mean task to get the basic migration done, and we are almost there. Journal migration is now complete. It was a lot of work, but we can all take some credit, academic publishers and funding institutes, for having done this job so quickly, for it is only ten years since we started. All journals must by now be available, somehow, somewhere, electronically. They can also communicate with each other, because electronic publishing is mainly about linking and not just about making a single publication available. A great job has been done in that respect. Haank is not preparing for his retirement speech, looking backwards. There are many more years to come because there is more work to do. He feels it is logical that we all started with journals, but the traditional book has fallen behind. Many of us are working towards, and have been successful in, getting the major reference works available online and getting them connected, but most of the books are not yet online, let alone being connected. And this is probably the next stage we should concentrate on – we certainly will concentrate on. This might not be technologically exiting. It is much more exciting to think of new technology to add