SSP NEWS 2008 Interview Highlights

SSPN
What do you think is the next big step forward in the information industry and/or professional and scholarly publishing?

Eugene Garfield
“That is a very broad and multifaceted question. There will be many new innovations. I do not consider myself a futurist, although when I look back on what I wrote 50 years ago, you could think I was Nostradamus. But then we forget about the mistakes that were made. I thought our personal alerting service called ASCA would be the hit of the century. But as a commercial product it could not support itself on its own. Today everybody thinks Google Alert is so great, partly because it is free. But most people don’t really know how to take advantage of alerting technology in a creative way.”
SSPN
What do you think is the next big step forward for scientific publishing?

Miriam Balabam
“It is hard to say, but possibly the next big step forward in scientific communication and publication will be stricter peer review within research institutions and posting on their own systems. The whole process will become more accessible and more economical.”
SSPN
You and others started HighWire Press in 1995. Now that it’s entering the teen years, what do you anticipate will be the major challenges to building on the success you’ve already achieved?

John Sack
“In the early years, there were two major challenges for HighWire Press. One was technical: the difficulty of programming early Web systems to work with the huge traffic we got from the public Internet. The other was an operational challenge: to get printers’ content production systems to produce what the Internet demanded.

Now the challenge is how to apply all that technology has to offer to a society’s education programs, publishing, internal operations, and all other possibilities, such as new business models. For example, all of our publishers have been very innovative over the years. But this is often confusing to libraries because no two license agreements are the same. We need to standardize in order to enjoy the wealth of innovation. We believe that HighWire Press allows publishers to go beyond technology by sharing the results of each society’s experiments in a community setting. Our mission is to continue to help our societies thrive in the future, and that involves more than technology.”