2006 Top Management Roundtable

September 6-8, 2006 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

2006 TMR Blog

For more than 25 years, the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Top Management Roundtable has brought together the industry's leading executives, technologists, strategists, commentators, and analysts for lively discussion and debate on the current year's critical topics.

This year's TMR theme is "Not Home Alone: Sustainable Publishing in an Interdependent World." The forum will provide an opportunity to explore the impact of the "empowered consumer," the authority of branding, the rise of informal publishing, and the formation of new commerce chains, all from a global perspective.We have lined up two high-profile keynote speakers:

Paul Duguid ^bio, co-author with John Seely Brown of The Social Life of Information and Adjunct Faculty at UC Berkeley's School of Information, and Kevin Guthrie ^bio, former Executive Director of JSTOR and now President of Ithaka. In between the two keynotes, we envision four two-hour-long panel sessions, with three or four panelists making brief remarks and engaging in a panel discussion. The moderator will serve as discussion facilitator, setting the scene for the panelists with probing questions.

Opening Keynote Address - When Worlds Collide: The Information Economy and the Scholarly Enterprise

Kevin Guthrie, ^bio President, Ithaka

In today's rapidly evolving networked economy, is every organization - even a scholarly or academic one - a start-up? At the very least, parts of every organization need to behave like one. Kevin Guthrie will share experience from over a decade starting and establishing several not-for-profit organizations serving the scholarly community, first at JSTOR and now at Ithaka. In the first part of the talk, he will share the principles that have guided the process of innovation for those organizations. In the second part, Kevin will provide observations on some of the major forces from the commercial information economy that are "colliding" with the prevailing approaches of the scholarly community. The concept of interdependence is not new - for example, commercial publishers and scholars have been engaged in symbiotic co-existence for decades - but the emerging interdependencies across "worlds" introduce new and challenging questions of scale, control, and scope.

Deeds to Words: The Changing Relationship Between Scholars and Their Publishers

Moderator: Charles Watkinson, ^bio Director, ASCSA Publications, American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Speakers:
Christopher Greer, ^bio Cyberinfrastructure Advisor, Office of the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, National Science Foundation
Mark McCabe, ^bio Professor of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology
Brent Shaw, ^bio Faculty Coordinator, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Repository

As "open" technology has moved downstream, scholars have become empowered users. The availability of software tools and institutional infrastructure has made it possible for authors to create their own publishing venues and to set the terms of engagement with their readers. But with this new authority comes responsibility and confusion. What role do traditional publishers play in the professional lives of scholars? Do new modes of publishing satisfy authors' needs to have their scholarship registered, to have its quality certified, to see it disseminated to a relevant audience, and to ensure that it is archived for posterity? What conventional values are still relevant, and what new competencies are needed by both publishers and authors in this emerging "Publishing 2.0" environment?

Global Exposure: New and Emerging Models and Strategies from Bangkok, Tokyo, Seattle, and Brooklyn

Moderator: Dan Tonkery, ^bio Vice President of Business Development, EBSCO Information Services

Speakers:
John Burns, ^bio Manager, eBook Conversion & Creation Technologies, Amazon.com
Pote N. Lee, Chairman, iGroup
Asako Omi, ^bio cofounder, J-STAGE
Bob Stein, ^bio Director, Institute for the Future of the Book

Marketing and technology innovations occur at the edges, where societies meet and industries collide. And disruptive technologies often breed best in the slip-stream of traditional R&D activity. In this session we'll look at some inventive and influential activities from the "off ramp" side of scholarly publishing, including new trade routes in Asia from the perspective of a multi-national information provider, the development of a nationally supported infrastructure for the publishing and archiving of e-journals in Japan, novel technologies being incubated at Amazon that will take us beyond Search-Inside-the-Book, and a powerful and transformative open source authoring system, called Sophie, from a small band of researchers on the East River.

Discovery Tools: Replanting the Tree of Knowledge

Moderator: Jill O'Neill, ^bio Director of Planning and Communication, NFAIS
Reverend A. K. M. Adam, ^bio Professor of New Testament, Seabury Theological Seminary
Robert Hanisch, ^bio Project Manager, US Virtual Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute
Amanda Spiteri, ^bio Product Marketing Director, Elsevier

The current digital information landscape provides more avenues to content than ever before: distributed and federated data, sophisticated human and machine search, specialized portals, wikis, and blogs. How are traditional and new indexing services blended to maximize discovery? How are researchers and educators navigating disciplinary and geographic boundaries? What is the yield of increased interactivity, in research labs, classrooms, hospitals, field work - any location? Are content creator and content user expectations matching up along the way? Where are publishers breaking new ground? What do users envision for the future? This panel discussion will encompass the entire spectrum of discovery in scholarship in today's digital environment.

Uncommon Ground? Intellectual Property in a Flat World

Moderator: Ed Colleran, ^bio Publisher Relations, Copyright Clearance Center

Speakers:
Thinh Nguyen, ^bio Counsel, Science Commons
William Strong, ^bio Partner, Kotin Crabtree and Strong, LLP
Ben White, ^bio Copyright Compliance and Licensing Manager, British Library

As the Internet has opened up the global distribution of content, publishers and libraries are facing changing attitudes and needs of readers and scholars who want access whenever and wherever, at no cost in this digitally flat world. How is the concept of intellectual property changing, nationally and internationally? How will new open access legislation and the growing popularity of depositing pre-publication content in institutional repositories affect a publisher's copyrights and business models? Does the trend for libraries to reshape their role to include the management of e-collections, e-reserves, and institutional repositories collide with copyright? What new rights and licensing models can we expect next?

Closing Keynote Address - The Stamp of Truth: Brands in the Marketplace of Ideas

Paul Duguid, ^bio Adjunct Professor, University of California Berkeley

Technological innovations have continuously raised hope that everyone who chooses may be his or her own publisher. Faced with this new-found openness, old, closed monopolies - newspapers, publishing houses, television stations - will fall away and a pure marketplace of ideas will emerge to be, as Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested, "the best test of truth." It hasn't quite turned out like that. Bloggers who champion the overthrow of "old" or "mainstream" media also value the credibility that established media provide them. This paradox suggests that getting ideas out into the world may be more complex than sticking them in cyberspace. Indeed, acting on too naive a view of the old institutions may tend neither to replace nor to reform them, but only to enhance them. Paul suggests that to understand "the power of thought to get itself accepted," we can think less about "markets" for ideas and more about "supply chains" and brands, and, in attempting to go it "alone" - from "home" or elsewhere - to consider not just independence but interdependence.

Closing Remarks

Judy Luther, Informed Strategies, SSP President