What do users want?

At a recent ALPSP seminar on The Article Economy, I was asked to contribute a paper with this title, ‘What do users want?’, and I looked at a number of pieces of evidence – some new, some older; some from my own department, some from elsewhere – to try to find an answer. It is an old rhetorical trick to answer a question with another question, and my second question is ‘Who are the users anyway?’ Often observers of the scholarly publishing scene assume that scholarly journals are a researchto-researcher medium with a large degree of overlap between the community of authors and the community of readers of a given journal title. Often it is also assumed that these researchers are predominantly based in academic institutions. I am sceptical about these assertions. I am particularly sceptical about them in the realm of STM journals, which make up the bulk of the output of the scholarly publishing industry. At the Article Economy seminar, several of the speakers referred to the importance of the corporate market for their journals, and its particular promise for new sales of separates. Of course, some journal articles are written by researchers working in commerce and industry, but generally they are in a minority, for reasons of commercial confidentiality. As a sweeping generalization, academic authors have to publish to advance their careers, while authors in the corporate sector may be positively discouraged from doing so by their employers. Thus academics write but corporate researchers read. Many more readers of scholarly journal articles are practitioners: this is particularly true in biomedical fields, but practising engineers, architects, lawyers, management consultants, and many other professions also read the scholarly literature. These people work for clients and are expected to be well informed and to possess advanced skills in their professional fields. So they have to read the literature, but they do not necessarily contribute to it. The ‘journals crisis’ largely affects academic libraries, which will continue to wish to buy through subscriptions, site licences, and consortium deals. Speakers at the seminar seemed to conclude that it is the corporate sector that will provide the main market for ‘the article economy’, and will be willing to pay substantial prices for quality separates. Another group of users mentioned a lot in the evidence that I reviewed was students. They featured particularly in the JISC-funded JUSTEIS (JISC User Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services) study undertaken at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. JUSTEIS found that students’ use of electronic information resources was unsystematic and haphazard. This coincides with many anecdotal observations that students (even information science students who should know better) nowadays regard the World Wide Web as the source of first resort, expect material on the web to be available free of charge, and find it hard to distinguish authenticated material from that which is not quality controlled. JUSTEIS found that students make little use of subject gateways or JISC-supported secondary services, preferring to go straight to the main web search engines. Some of what students consume is another kind of separate – book chapters – which was the main subject of another JISC-funded project, PELICAN at Loughborough. However, PELICAN’s respondents kept straying into the journal area in their comments. It is clear that the ‘market’ for articles includes many students at both the underand postgraduate level. PELICAN was concerned mostly with devising a workable model for the provision of materials from lecturers’ reading lists electronically to students, with relatively trouble-free permissions systems, probably through a centralized co-operative body along the lines of the CLA. The evidence from my own study undertaken for Ingenta (which I now have to learn Guest Editorial 83