Paul Coyne :: Blog :: publishing

This piece, from Simon Caulkin at the Observer, seems too timely and relevent to not post here. I suspect there's a few more wringing their hands over how we arrived at this current crisis - the Listserves are full of conversation over this.  

Simon Caulkin: When it came to the crunch, MBAs didn't help

It's not just in finance that the inquests have begun. What part have the business schools and business academics played in the implosion of the world's banking system? That was the question posed in a letter to the Financial Times last week by Nottingham University Business School's Professor Ken Starkey.

Hedge funds, private equity, investment banking, venture capital and consulting - the high priesthood of financial capitalism - were overwhelmingly MBAs' preferred job destinations, he noted. Now the schools needed to 'reflect on the role of the MBA and MBAs in the carnage of Wall Street' and consider 'how management education has contributed to the mindset that has led to the excesses of the last two decades'.

This isn't the first time that theory and theorists have been called into question. Three years ago the London Business School's late Sumantra Ghoshal caused a furore by writing that business schools did not need to do a lot more to prevent the emergence of future Enrons; they just needed to stop doing a good deal of what they were doing already.

But the questioning takes on a fresh urgency as the crises grow bigger. In this context, the issue is not just the implication of economics-dominated MBA courses in practices that are now seen to be unsustainable. 'There seems to be no sense of history,' Starkey complains. 'How come we haven't learnt anything from Enron, the dotcoms and Long Term Capital Management?'

Trapped until now in a stampede to emulate the American model, business schools elsewhere need to step back and see how they could, and should, frame the issues differently, he says. The Holy Grail is not to turn them into professional institutes (as two Harvard professors proposed in another FT article the same day) but the more modest one of 'doing better social science'. They should move away from unquestioned US positivism and the dominance of neo-classical economics towards a broader perspective allowing insights from other areas, including history, literature and art.

Could it happen? Starkey is not the only one who senses an opportunity for the market to move in a new direction. The 'elite' business schools are doomed to remain locked in increasing competition for a (presumably) shrinking pool of apprentice masters of the universe. But for others, says Professor James Fleck, dean of the Open University Business School, Europe's largest, the time is ripe to go beyond the fake certainties of the Anglo-American version, with its emphasis on analytics and separate functions, to develop a more inclusive, less lopsidedly right-brain approach to management.

Most of the world is not well served by the structures or assumptions of financial capitalism. If we could lift our eyes from the financial chaos, Fleck argues, we would see that the world is at the start of a huge technological upswing. As a consequence, there is terrific, unsatisfied demand for people to manage this innovation in ways that benefit more than a tiny financial elite. Management, in the sense of 'making a difference', could be the enabling technology of the 21st century. Who better placed to undertake such a project, and rethink the intellectual underpinnings of capitalism, than European business schools?

Many would welcome such a move. At Leicester School of Management, Professor Martin Parker notes that, though long submerged under the 'there is no alternative' discourse, an undercurrent of resistance to the market managerialism of the past 30 years has always subsisted - and not just in the public sector (where, duly adapted, it has ironically been practised with terrifying thoroughness). The surprising rage and venom hissing through the blogs commenting on a recent Economist leader about bankers' pay show just how deep it runs in the private sector too.

Little of this surfaces in formal management research, however. Analysing 2,300 articles published in prominent journals in 2003 and 2004, Parker and two colleagues found business-school researchers overwhelmingly concentrating on narrow technical questions rather than the larger social and political issues - the environment, war, workers' rights, the distribution of wealth - which business has signally failed to provide answers to. While the piece, ('Speaking Out: The Responsibilities of Management Intellectuals'), pre-dated the financial crash, in one sense it reinforces it - underlining that in terms of what academics actually publish, little seems to have changed since Enron, or even the dotcoms.

The underlying question, says Parker, is whether business schools can contribute to the solution rather than the problem. One way of doing this, he suggests, would be to reformat themselves as 'Schools for Organising' that can teach and learn from a multiplicity of different forms - 'and do not simply reproduce the ideology of people called managers'.

 

An interesting and relevent piece found on ReadWriteWeb.com. Wonder how this trend will inform our own web strategies? It's kinda along the lines i talked about at a recent web 2.0 talk and publishing and the overwhelming amount of choice out there now compared to 10 years ago, so it's timely too. Will watch with interest...

 

You are not the center of the universe, especially on the internet. That's the lesson that even the biggest web brands are learning fast, and we expect to see widespread cultural changes occur right along side their learning.

One week after we wrote about the leaked screenshots that have since been confirmed as the forthcoming home page design of AOL.com, where 3rd party content and functionality is now welcome to come on in through the front door, now Yahoo! is telling the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. The era of the walled garden is over.

What's Coming to Yahoo.com

Yahoo told the AP this morning that it will soon roll out the first major redesign of its home page in two years. That redesign will host a wide variety of widgets from rival services like movie links from Netflix, music from iTunes and Amazon. It will be something like the Facebook platform, but with more prominent placement for 3rd party services than even Facebook offers. Yahoo has talked about this plan before, but now is making a media push in preparation for action.

Left: The awesome logo for this week's Yahoo Hack Day

Just Like AOL.com, and Everyone Else On Top of Their Game

Yahoo's plans are similar to what AOL appears to be planning, where activity updates 3rd party social networks and possibly an on-site RSS reader will bring new functionality to AOL users.

As we wrote last week about AOL's strategy:

Aggregation of content from around the web is quite likely a key part of the future for almost all successful websites; the web is too large to pretend you're an island any more, even if your network is sprawling it just can't compete with the options offered by the web at large. While mainstream users used to think that AOL was the internet for years, they are not so naive any more.

This is an Important Trend

We've written here about the new class of powerhouse sites that specialize in bricolage, the art of assembling found objects. (Think BoingBoing and Neatorama). We've also written about why online noise is good for you. We don't expect the big portals to go as far with this strategy at first as the edge publishers have, but just like Google's indexing the open web blew the Yahoo! directory out of the water in search - so too is a new paradigm in aggregate publishing out-competing brand-selected, human edited portals.

Right: Hugh MacLeod puts it frankly.

It's an exciting time. We look forward to seeing how the rest of the world changes as the leading sources of information online turn towards a model of intelligent collecting and sharing, as opposed to a closed, self-facing broadcast model.

Discuss

Tracey Caldwell, Information World Review, Wednesday 11 July 2007 at 00:00:00

Thomson's journal impact metric savaged

An argument has erupted about the impact factor measure of scientific journals following an editorial in the journal Retrovirology damning Thomson Scientific’s Impact Factor (IF) metric as flawed, misleading and...

> Read the full article

This article is a complete reprint of George Siemens article, 'Scholarship in an age of participation'. reproduced under the terms of granted by his Creative Commons Licence

George Siemens
March 27, 2007

Journals are an essential and trusted aspect of knowledge growth and dissemination. New discoveries, advances in disciplines, and critical solutions to complex problems find their home in academic journals. The future language and concepts of science and society often find their first life in peer review and formal publication. Citations are the heart of the process - establishing reputations and providing the infrastructure for knowledge growth and information integrity.

Eugene Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) utilizes citation analysis to determine (obviously) the impact of the journal. Larry Page’s (of Google) insight into the value of links (backrub as was his initial term) as a means of determining authority altered web search and online information access (John Battelle). By treating each link as a citation, and determining value of a web page based on incoming links, web sites are assigned a "page rank" similar to Garfield’s JIF.

Citations and weblinks are the lubricant of knowledge growth. Yet journals - the vehicle of citations - possess a weakness derived from the structured process of review and publishing. The methodical process of submission - editor evaluation, numerous reviews, and finally (possibly) publishing - is intended to filter those ideas lacking solid research or possessing faulty reasoning. The process is time consuming. Publication can take from six to twelve months (in some cases even longer).

The process itself can be frustrating for authors, with limited opportunities to address faults of, or engage in dialogue around, anonymous reviews. Peer review suffers challenges similar to any aspect of society - where power and knowledge aggregate, there is room for abuse and misuse. What peer review does offer is an element of transparency and authority from experts. The informalization of information, as evidenced by increased use of informal citations in student papers, growth of Wikipedia, and use of Google for research, presents new challenges. The basis of peer review and the architecture of citations are critical for academic discourse. Our challenge is one of preserving the value of traditional approaches, while utilizing the best of emerging approaches.

Trends influencing formal publication

Four significant trends are creating conditions of change in academic journals:

• Growth of information,
• Expectation of participation,
• Increased openness,
• Two-way flow

Growth of Information
The growth of information hardly requires proof – we feel it in our daily lives. The growth of multi-media, internet, information management systems, advanced search engines, and academic contributions from emerging economies are only a few of the changes making their presence known in our personal lives. Our personal experience is validated with numerous studies. A research project at University of California at Berkeley stated that the global information base grew 75% from 2000 to 2002. A recent IDC report predicts a six-fold increase in digital information between 2006 and 2010.

The argument for change is simple: When characteristics and context of knowledge – the core element of the journal process – change, the processes, tools, and institutions which interact with knowledge must change as well.

Expectation of participation
Late last year, Time Magazine declared “you” – the amateur journalist, podcaster, blogger, wikipedia editor, and those who contributed to, and created the current participatory culture – its Person of the Year. The digital habits of many online participants have changed. No longer are we satisfied to simply consume the content of others. We desire to create, to participate, to collaborate, and to be involved. In many cases, content consumption is blended with content creation - a culture of create, co-create, and re-create.

Increased openness
Growing concern about the public “paying twice” for information (once in the research dollars to fund the research and again in reading the research in a journal) is driving a shift in open access in educational materials.

Peter Suber states that:

Open Access (OA) “is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature. The primary difference is that the bills are not paid by readers and hence do not function as access barriers.”

Two-way flow
Tim Berners-Lee’s intent with the web was not to create a broadcast medium, but instead to create a read-write medium. While this vision languished for many years, partly due to the complexity of technology and publishing and partly due the "architecture of participation" being unformed. The last five years have largely attended to these challenges. Social software enables anyone to setup and publish his or her ideas. Many news sites now offer discussions around articles and audio and video files. As Public Library of Science demonstrates, formal, peer reviewed journal articles benefit from annotation and commenting features. Essentially, the two-way flow, read-write nature of scholarly communication removes “established knowledge” from the pedestal where only select few can comment.

Implications
For many, the citations of formal journals have given way to the page rank of Google, or the tags of Technorati. Journal citations are the specialty of a small segment of society – the academically proficient. Technorati, Google, and del.icio.us are the citation machines of the masses. The filtering performed by journals – through editorial and peer review – tests information before it enters the public sphere. Today’s online publishing tools enable anyone to publish, and testing and validation of information occurs through the actions of many (links, comments, blog posts, or social bookmarks).

The rigid, sometimes restrictive, nature of journals results in learners often soliciting more accessible and less complex sources of information. A large part of the challenge stems from lack of learner familiarity with the process of peer review – a key information literacy weakness. A process more in line with the spaces and tools of learners today – situated in a community-based environment – may prove to be an important resource in setting the foundation for the next generation of researchers and academics – blending the value of emerging tools with the proven model of review and citations.

Existing in two worlds
Numerous disciplines are facing a foundational shift in their method, process, and end user. Music, newspaper, television, radio and movie industries are embroiled in core redefinition of how they relate to their customers. Google has altered basic information search, and now threatens to alter academic search as well (through Google Scholar and Book Search).

Against this backdrop of changing end-user expectations, developing technologies, and changed flow of information, academic journals must adjust to retain their relevance. The changes moving forward require a balance of honoring what has worked well with journals – peer review and the citation model in particular – and adopting those democratic elements revealed in Amazon’s reviews (though anonymous), Digg’s rating, and Wikipedia’s collaboration. We need to begin experimenting with our scholarly routines to reflect the needs of today’s researchers, learners, and society.

The value of journals is not in question. The process and pace of journal development, however, is experiencing increasingly difficult challenges. The pace of journal publication is too slow in many fields. Ideas that have been discussed at length in online forums, blogs, and conferences often only appear in journals several years later. The process concerns are based on blind review and lack of community participation and discussion.

The fault lines of “expert vs. amateur”, “genius vs. community”, formal vs. informal, need not be drawn thickly. Instead of separate and opposing camps, a gradient model of shades perhaps best reflects a suitable model for moving forward. By keeping our feet in two worlds - citation and review of traditional journals as well as participative, open emerging models - we are able to attend to broad range of needs for academics and today's learners.

Academic Scholarship Today
Blending the best of traditional journals with emerging tools of managing high levels of information presents unique opportunities for moving journals forward as a cornerstone for information creation, dissemination, and sharing.

The following are guiding principles are suggested:

1. Two-fold model: peer-reviewed and informal commons
2. Open reviews
3. Meta-Reviews
4. Discussion
5. Annotation
6. Journal as community

Two-paths
Our need for scholarly work runs on varying gradients between formal and informal. The easy access of search engines and sites like Wikipedia, provide a simple access point to “quick and dirty” information. More involved research (such as writing a thesis or submitting an article for formal publication) requires greater use of traditional scholarship. Our knowledge need drives the tool we require. As many bloggers have discovered, peer review can help to shape and create ideas prior to publication (Chris Anderson's book Long Tail).

To attend to this dual need for information, a journal should permit traditional peer-review, as well as the informal review of the commons. As detailed in Figure 1 of a proposed flow of a "current journal", an author has the option of submitting a document for either formal review or commons review (though even the formal article ends in the commons after review). Articles that initiate in the commons can be moved through the formal peer process if the author chooses (and the community rates the article sufficiently well). Readers of the journal will rate articles posted into the commons (similar to Stumbleupon or Amazon rating or the Digg metric of raising the profiles of articles ranked by the community). Articles that are established are then published in the online journal as well as a paper journal. OJR forms the base of the system.

Open reviews
Anonymous review is frequently criticized as a limitation of journals. Journals need to make the comments of all reviewers public in order to form the basis of deep dialogue. No source of information should receive a privilege status. All information is available to democratic dialogue.

Meta reviews
Healthy systems permit feedback. Members of a community require the ability to “review the review”. This may be a controversial approach – the anonymity of reviewers enables expression of ideas that may be difficult in open public forums. As a democratic model, however, the ability to rate the value of each review is important. Even experts are not immune from changing pressures to the creation and dissemination of information. Editors, journalists, researchers, and others are subject to the back channel models of evaluation.

Discussion
Articles, which have gone through the commons or the formal review process, are subject to annotation and discussion. Any member of the journal community has the ability to comment on the articles, and engage the author and community members in discussion. Discussions are appended to each article. Discussions of a more general or cross article nature can be held in separate forums.

Annotation
Annotations differ from discussion in the granularity of focus. Annotations focus on or address a single idea – a statistic, citation, or comment. Public Library of Science uses an annotation system where a blue asterisk is placed inline to alert readers to an annotation.

Journal as community
A journal is an opportunity to move beyond content or information consumption. While “community” and “journal” may not appear to fit together well, journals typically bring together the prominent thinkers and interested stakeholders of a discipline. Enlarging the conversation of journals to include deep discourse on articles and annotation throughout, sets the basis for a democratic, social model of scholarship.

The Model:

The model and process of the proposed journal is as follows (based on OJS flow) :

Figure 1: Suggested Process and Flow of Journals Today

Challenges
The established structure of peer review and academic publication is a difficult place for experimentation of new ideas. Nature’s experiment with open review resulted in poor researcher and reader involvement: of 1369 papers, only 5% agreed to open peer review. Of those, only 54% received comments. The poor showing of articles submitted to open review led the publishers of Nature to conclude: “[We] will continue to explore participative uses of the web. But for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.”

Poor performance of Nature’s foray into openness could be due to numerous factors: apathy on the part of community members (wishing to read instead of participate), uncertainty of the process, researcher’s reluctance to put ideas into public spaces before peer review, the nature of the discipline (fields of philosophy and psychology, for example, may foster more formative discussion as compared with hard sciences), and general lack of familiarity with participative processes. Nature’s experience provides important consideration in continued experimentation to revise the nature of scholarship. For the proposed journal discussed next, it is hoped that greater reliance on community will serve as the crucial element in increasing dialogue.

Next Steps
Theory finds its fullness in application. The interplay between theoretical constructs and the lessons learned in application require a malleable approach to journal formation. Issues of identity, fairness, civility, and engaging in democratic environments, require dialogue and an adaptive approach. Quite simply – as academics, we do not have a clear model of implementation for scholarship in light of current online trends. We need to adopt and experimental approach of sensing, evaluating, and responding to trends. Beyond being a community, the proposed journal is emergent – reflective of, and responsive to, the community it serves.

The dramatic changes to how information and knowledge are created, disseminated, and consumed are forcing traditional industries (and any information structure) to change as well. The experiences of newspapers, journalism, the music and movie industries, can serve as an indication to the types of changes academics face. Perhaps, instead of banning participatory sites, we can avoid mistakes of others, and begin experimenting with models of adaptation that preserve the best of tradition, while simultaneously incorporating new approaches to knowledge creation and dissemination.

Your Involvement
The principles discussed in this paper form the basis of a collaborative project between North American and European researchers and academics. We are requesting involvement from individuals interested in contributing to the development of the journal – enlarging its representation to include a global audience. If you would like to participate in discussions to shape the journal itself, or subsequent involvement in the community, please let us know. The application of ideas, of course, tests, informs, and revises theory. The journal will focus on emerging trends in educational technology and pedagogy, exploring fields of social software, connectivism, and networked learning. The current group of journal founders has established a conversation space (you are invited to create an account and contribute to the conversation. If you have specific questions, please email me). We will use Open Journal System as the base of the journal, with modifications to allow for dialogue, annotation, and the process detailed in Figure 1 of this article. Our intent is to provide a journal free of charge to authors and readers (many open journal models charge authors or institutions, not readers - while this is a viable model, our experiment is focused on volunteer efforts).

This posting from the 'Eclectic Librarian' talks about the changes in how journals will be published in the future. The electronic format suits the nature of journals very well, and the trend towards born digital content is plainly glaring us in the face.

However, one thing I have not heard discussed much is what this is doing to the concept of units within a journal.Will we continue the arcane practice of breaking up journals into discrete volumes and issues? I don't think so. Already we are seeing publishers take advantage of the electronic format by providing access (for subscribers) to articles in press prior to the actual publication date of the issue. I think that eventually, the journal as an entity will be comprised of an editorial board and review process, with a certain quantity of articles per year made available to subscribers as they clear that process.

Unless an issue has a particular theme, there's almost no need to maintain the discreteness of paper publishing in the electronic world. Sure, we'll need identifiers for citations and references and such, but we have that already with the DOI and OpenURL frameworks.

And besides, if students no longer think of the journal as an entity, then eventually researchers will do the same because today's students are tomorrow's content providers.

Via eclectic librarian: the future of the journal

 

 

Richard Baraniuk is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. In this presentation, he introduces Connexions, the open-access publishing system that's changing the landscape of education by providing free coursework and educational materials to everyone in the world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:18) 

kind of interesting, especially after a recent Publishing 2.0 conference which demostrated some of the technologies Richard talks about here. I'm not yet convinced that this utopia is at all achievable; but if it is I guess we should pay attention!

 

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) Group has made its award-winning health information available via mobile phones. From acne to warts, the latest on more than 80 common medical conditions can now be accessed from a mobile phone, allowing people to view trusted health information wherever and whenever they need it, in complete privacy.

BMJ BestTreatments is produced by the BMJ Group, and is designed to give the public access to information on which treatments work and which don’t, based on the best and most up-to-date research. The BMJ says the site, produced by Jar Developments, will answer common questions such as:
‘Is there anything I can do to recover quickly from jet lag when I go on holiday?’
‘I’ve had unprotected sex and think I may have caught something, but I’m embarrassed to talk about it. Where can I get reliable, down-to-earth information before I visit my doctor?’
‘My child takes ages to get to sleep and wakes up two or three times in the night. Is there anything I can do which will help?’
“This is a unique service,” says Editor Cherrill Hicks. “Although people are increasingly using their mobile phone to receive information, this is the first time people will be able to view high quality, trustworthy health content at their own convenience and where they feel most comfortable. Evidence shows that more and more people are using their mobile phone to access the internet, so this service may also help to address health inequalities – a key government commitment - by providing equal access to those who don’t have the internet but who may have a mobile phone.”
To access BMJ BestTreatments on a WAP-enabled mobile, UK users text ‘BMJMYHEALTH’ to 60300 at a cost of £3, and are sent a link to the BestTreatments WAP site. Alternatively users can key ‘bmj.myhealth.com’ into their phone’s browser.
The BMJ Group's flagship journal is the weekly British Medical Journal (BMJ). The BMJ is rated as one of the world's top five general medical journals. About 1.2 million people download 6.5 million pages a month from bmj.com and more than 100,000 doctors in the UK and 14,800 internationally receive the weekly print BMJ.

 

 

It was the Publishing 2.0 yesterday. At Bletchley Park. Those of a nerdy disposition will understand the significance of the the place, and for me it was a real thrill to be there to look over the Colossus and teh Bombes and to walk in the footsteps of Alan Turing.

Bletchley Park mathematician Alan Turing realised that 'cribs' offered a way of cracking Enigma. A 'crib' is a piece of encrypted text whose true meaning is known or can be guessed. German messages were formulaic in places and the first line often contained standard information, for example weather conditions. Once a crib was known, it was still necessary to check thousands of potential Enigma settings to read a message, and to do this quickly Turing designed a electro-mechanical codebreaking machine called a Bombe. Each Bombe simulated the actions of 10 Enigma machines and was able to check all potential settings at high speed.

Cracking the 'impenetrable' Enigma code enabled Britain to foil Luftwaffe bombing raids, minimise U-Boat attacks and secure sea-based supply routes

Further codebreaking success enabled Bletchley Park to exploit Lorenz, a highly sophisticated cipher used personally by Hitler and his High Command. But many of the messages still took several weeks to decipher - a computing machine was needed. The result was Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, designed by Max Newman.

Colossus was the size of a living room and weighed about one tonne. Its 2,400 valves replicated the pattern of an encrypted Lorenz message as electrical signals. This breakthrough in computing remained a secret for many years, to the extent that two Americans took the credit for inventing the computer in 1945. But the creation of Colossus proved to be a key contributor to the success on D-Day.

The Conference was OK.

Actually the Conference was more than OK. Organised by XML UK the day was about determining whether or not there was such a thing as Publishing 2.0 and if it did exist, what would it look like? what characterises Publishing 2.0?

Some key Drivers for Change were suggested; these would alter the online publishing environment. 

Funding     - Changing profiles for revenue generation including Open Access, Software as Service (SaS), Content on Demand - all are capable of disrupting existing models of funding

Technology - Innovations in delivering semantically rich content will raise user expectations for content delivery, search and browse.

The first trick is to define '2.0'. This was suggested:

• User Generated Content - Blogs, Wikis, RSS. User as Author
• Architecture of Participation - Friends, peers, wikis and collaborative working
• Group Dynamics/Network effects - The more people on the netowrk site, the richer more valuable and attractive it becomes
• Edge Based Innovation - allowing users to 'mash-up' content and create new services and content based on yours
  

I don't have any arguments with this list; it's simple enough and it gets across the main principles, such as they are. With respect to 'Publishing 2.0' I don't believe the first three points are particularly contentious, I'm just not sure about Edge-based Innovation/Mashups. For some publishers perhaps this is not a problem; it might even be desirable. One example is the Dublin Dart. they publish information about where a train is at any particular point in time. Some clever bugger then piped this information into Google Maps to produce a real-time map of a train's progress. Great stuff, but when it comes to copyrighted content and research materials or any content that suffers and loses part of it's meaning when taken out of context surely this is not desirable?

An interesting trends that has been noted was the move toward Online office applications. For me, this has the potential to re-engineer the content creation chain altogether as more and more people (researchers, students, managers) use blogs, wikis, Google Docs etc, to create content Online and allow others to view the raw material almost straight away.

Another interesting development/future trend or opportunity for publishers is the ability to offer Services, as well as content. Examples cited in the day ranged from Online Communities(which are, apparently very popular with researchers and authors of reference works) through to Publisher Search/Browse functions embedded within an Organisations' intranet. This leads neatly into the development of Software as Service (SaS) in which the subscription model is replaced by Software Metering

Personally I don't like SaS and Software Metering. It removes stability from the budgeting function and prevents both Publisher and Subscriber in developing a proper forecast for their business/organisation. It might be applicable in other publishing circles.

The Royal Society of Chemistry demonstrated their Project Prospect. This is an example of an RSC Enriched Journal. Because the RSC have adopted a highly structured XML approach to content development, If I understand this correctly, they are now able to add some significant value to their article content. The rich ontology development that has taken place allows for a toolbox feature on their articles that offers different views of the document - all of the compounds mentioned in the article, key Chemical terminology, important references - all can be highlighted immediately with the toolbar. I thought this was tremendous. It got me thinking too. Is there such an ontology for business and management education? If not, why not? is it too dificult, too contentious a thing to bring together? Perhaps Emerald, as the world's leading publisher of Management Journals is in a position to rally other's to the flag and start work on developing a global(?) ontology for business and management education? One for follow up at a later date I think?

I can't really sign of without mention of Leigh Dodds (Ingenta) work with developing an RDF database for content management and semantic search/retrieval. Leigh gave us the how and the why of RDF as a technology and proceeded to describe how he and his team have converted the metadata of over almost 30,000 articles into over 200 million RDF triples. Using some emerging tools and XML vocabularies Leigh demonstrated how a semantically rich content management system could be developed. Until this presentation I had relegated OWL, RDF, SPARQL to items of academic interest but with no real world applications. For developing a data neutral means of accessing content and inferring relations between things and people this was a revelation. I can't wait to start developing something small scale here at Emerald.

So, a good and useful day with much to follow up and think about. I'm not sure we decided what Publishing 2.0 was, or even if it existed, but I got to see the Colossus and so everything's all right.