ICSTI Annual Report 2003/2004

ICSTI

2004 GENERAL ASSEMBLY

London, England

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD

In compliance with Statutes 11.6 and 16 and By-Law 8.1, the Executive Board presents to the General Assembly a report of its activities and a review of the activities of ICSTI and its Committees during the preceding year. The finances of ICSTI are reviewed in the Treasurer's Final Year-End Financial Report 2003 and in the Auditors Report...

The annual report covers the period June 2003 - April 2004 and refers to the resolutions of and actions consecutive to the main meetings held during this period:

  • The 2003 General Assembly held in Ottawa, Canada May 8-12[1]
  • The Winter Meetings of 15-18 January in Paris

CONTENT:

 2MEMBERSHIP

 3INFORMATION POLICY ISSUES

 4TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES PROGRAMME

 6DISCUSSION SESSIONS AT MEETINGS

 8PROMOTIONAL TOOLS

11EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR´S REPORT

11SECRETARIAT ADMINISTRATION

12ANNEXE 1

MEMBERSHIP

ICSTI membership increased during the period with five new full members in Class B and a returning member as well as one new associate member in Class C.

In class B:

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)
Representative: Mr. Han-Chul PARK, Senior Coordinator
Alternate: Mr. Hye-Kyong Hwang, Librarian

Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai, India
Representative: R. PARTHASARATHY, CEO
Alternate: Mrs. Indira S. RAJAN, Sr.Vice President - Business Development
Scope e-Knowledge,Chennai,Tamilnadu, India
Representative: Sivadas RAGHAVA, Director & CEO
Alternate: Chandu NAIR
Thomson Scientific (Derwent), U.K.
Representative: Mr. Michael TANSEY, CEO
Alternate: Mr. Robert WILLOWS

U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, USA
Representative: Ms. Deanna MARCUM, PhD

Returning member under this category:

U.S. Department of Energy,Oak Ridge, USA
Representative: Mr. Brian A. HITSON
Alternate: Mr. Walter WARNICK

In class C:

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) West Sussex,UK
Representative: Ms. Sally Morris, Chief Executive

The US Department of Energy, in Class B

During the last year there has been two ere no formal resignations froms OCLC and CEA-Saclay. CSIRO have not resigned, but are, however, having budget difficulties and will pay 1/2 their dues for 2004.

The Executive Director and/or the President plan to send a special letter to those two Members who have not formally resign but have had administrative difficulties either in in obtaining budget for the subscription or in identifying their representative. The Members who have been written off are: ASLIB, Swets Blackwells, National Central Library (TW), and NCI.

Names of all Members representatives and their contact addresses are best found in the updated Members directory As for April 2004 the directory lists eight (8) Full Members of Class A, thirty two (32) Full members of Class B, nine (9) Associate Members (Class C), six (6) Class D Honorary Members and nine (9) ICSTI Fellows.1

At all meetings the urge to recruit new Members is discussed but also the difficulty presented by the present membership dues structure. At the Winter Meeting the Executive Board asked the Executive Director to prepare a plan for recruiting new members to be discussed at the next (London) Annual Meeting.

Eamon Fennessy was asked to take up again the chairmanship of the Membership Committee after Walter Finch’s resignation.

INFORMATION POLICY ISSUES

  • Digital Electronic Archiving

In early 2003 the ICSTI (and CENDI) membership were asked by Gail Hodge to participate in a new survey for the updating of the study "Permanent Access to Digital Information." The aim was to identify relevant projects for additional, more detailed follow-up investigation. A first progress report on the study was presented by Bonny Caroll at the Ottawa meeting. The final result of the study was published in February 2004 Digital Preservation and Permanent Access to Scientific Information: the State of the Practice.

As had been done for the first study in 1999, the report was made openly available for downloading to ICSTI’s membership and non-members from the ICSTI Reports page. For non-members a free registration is requested for statistical purposes. Approximately 121 downloads to-date.

The Executive Board supported the project proposed by David Russon as follow-on to ICSTI’a Advocacy Statement on Digital Preservation. This has to be cleared with the Publications Board of the IUCr whose role is to survey their scientists members regarding their experience with preservations issues.

  • World Summit on Information Society

ICSTI had been participating, with CODATA and ICSU, in the preparations for the meeting in Geneva in December 2003. Some of our Members were present and participated in the working groups.

The ICSTI Bureau approved the document Archival Preservation of Digital Materials as input from the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) on the subject of digital archiving, a subject where ICSTI has been active for some time. The document suggests that the WSIS sees permanent availability of digital materials as an important global requirement of the Information Society. The Members have been invited to make their views on this subject known to the delegates who represent their country at WSIS.

At the Winter Meeting the ICSTI President reported that ICSU’s efforts to make an input to the WSIS Conference had successfully resulted in naming Science as one of Information Society’s important components, and that ICT has only an instrumental role, in the WSIS Declaration of Principles (paragraph 7, 9 and 17) published at the issue of the Conference in Geneva.

  • Legal Aspects

- On the news that the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Common (UK) was having an hearing on Scientific Publication the ICSTI Bureau asked the Executive Director to prepare a general position paper on this issue to be submitted in time to the enquiry. The text of the statement stressed mainly the world-wide activity and responsibility of Science Publication (see ICSTI site for the complete textReport to the Science and Technology Committee, (UK) House of Commons.

- Eamon Fennessy represented ICSTI at the STM meeting on Copyright (October 2003 in Frankfurt, Germany). His report from the meeting was made available by the Secretariat to all interested members.

- ICSTI News in August 2003 reported on the draft of a new EU Directive on enforcing Intellectual Property Protection, the reactions of specially the librarian community, the withdrawal of this directive from the European Parliament Agenda in February 2004, the amendments and the final approval by the council of ministers in April 2004.

- The Executive Directorreported on the present status of the EU Directive on Access to Public Data, which was that a political agreement has been reached on the 27 March 2004, regarding the text of the directive. It appeared that, as was the case of many of these directives, much of the implementation will be left the individual states. At this occasion a discussion on access to information provided from EU funded research took place and Hubert Gruttemeier provided a short summary of CORDIS.

- The Executive Director reported also on the status of the EU Copyright Directive, which was the one of the directives that most major EU countries had implemented in their national legislation (with the exception of the U.K.). The Executive Director thought it would be interesting to ask ICSTI Members to report (if they had the information) on how the elements concerning research, and private use and teaching had been implemented in the various countries. Bernard Dumouchel reported that in the U.K., even before the legislation had been passed, publishers and document delivery agencies were expected to identify users as being private or commercial and to identify documents delivered as to whether they had to pay royalties.

  • Electronic Documents Standardization

Gerard Giroud reported on moves by the patent offices to standardize production of patent documents using XML and DTD. During the discussion it became clear that there was a wide range of actions by various scientific groupings to create standard versions for their various uses. It was clear that there was no overall standard for the production of electronic scientific papers, although there were many specific standards for different subjects.

It was agreed that an attempt would be made to identify registries of DTDs and to make this available to Members via the Web site.

TECHNICAL PROGRAMME

  • Socio-economic impact of Information

The purpose of the project was to identify the socio-economic impacts of STM (Scientific Technical & Medical) information on the knowledge-based economy, and to determine the role and long-term impacts of STM information organizations in the national innovation system.

The results of the study were presented by Hussein Rostum at ICSTI’s Public Conference in Ottawa on 9 May 2003. Not withdrawing a detailed enquiry with the participating ICSTI organizations and an in depth analysis of relevant literature the study could not provide a consolidated list of impact factors. It was acknowledged in the discussions how difficult such quest is also in others domains like for example research funding and that ICSTI project was a initial effort in that direction. One of the concrete results, among others, is an analysis tool for possible relevant activities in information services.

Members received with thanks a preliminary draft report from Hussein Rostum at the TACC meeting in Ottawa. No additional focused addendum directed to the operations of the sponsoring members could be provided but an executive summary was added. After the Ottawa meeting the entire report was edited to a final version and made available in paper copy to the sponsoring organizations. There were widely diverse views on how it could be published and at what price. It was finally agreed that the main objective of publishing the report is to obtain publicity for ICSTI. After discussions within the Executive Board it was decided to make the report freely available for downloading from the ICSTI site but requiring free registration for non-members to give ICSTI the possibility to measure the interest in the subject. Approximately 157 downloads to-date.

  • Web Portal Project

Bernard Dumouchel reported on the status of a joint effort with CODATA to create an electronic resource to assist developing countries in their efforts to address issues of digital preservation. CODATA/South-Africa is responsible for the issue of portal maintenance once created; several tools and options are under consideration as well as final questions on functionalities.The group was awaiting information from South Africa on the cost to run and maintain the portal. It was considered important that this project should identify best practices and lessons learned. The updating of the ICSTI/CENDI study on digital preservation, collecting information on actual preservation projects will be useful for this project.

  • Proposed project on document delivery by ICSTI Member Organizations

Bernard Dumouchel introduced the topic. Document delivery services are becoming more and more complicated because of widespread application of consortia site licensing and difficulties with publishers to allow document delivery centers to use digital files. He suggested that ICSTI members who were directly concerned and others, might be interested in a study on trends on document delivery. This could include associated issues concerning data archives and the problems associated with permission not being granted to deposit libraries to use such archives for document delivery.

It was agreed that a shared workspace should be created on ICSTI’s Quick Place facility to start work on specifications of such a study, which would then be circulated more widely for comment.

The member organizations expected to comment are BL, CISTI, INIST, JST, NTIS, and EPO.

  • Categorization of Science

The issue is pursued in discussion at the Information Policy Committee where Gerard Giroud detailed the Harmony Project that aims to harmonize the European, USA and Japanese patent classification schemes. This will be integrated with the WIPO efforts to reform the International Patent Classification. He invited Members to consider these efforts and how ICSTI could benefit of it for promoting access to scientific and technical information. Bonnie Caroll suggested that a roster of this issue and others be drawn up and circulated at library schools as potential providers of reports for example for thesis. Michael Breaks undertook to provide a list of library schools worldwide. Gerard Giroud would post the classification on the Web site when it is completed.

  • COUNTER project.

ICSTI was one of thirty Founding Sponsors for the COUNTERproject (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources), an international initiative that serves librarians, publishers and intermediaries by providing a Code of Practice that facilitates the recording and exchange of online usage statistics ( In 2003 COUNTER was incorporated in England as a not-for-profit company ('Counter Online Metrics'), and is now a membership-based organization. All Founding Sponsors became automatically members for 2003, and ICSTI Executive Board decided to continue its support by renewing its membership for 2004.

DISCUSSION SESSIONS AT MEETINGS

(what do we do here?? is there any record of the discussion in Columbus?)

2003 General Assembly
1999 General AssemblyAn informative summary report on the entire meeting, both the Public (technical) Conference on 9 May 2003, and the business meetings was produced by the Executive Director very soon after the meeting had taken place and has been posted on the ICSTI Members Area of the site.

The topic of the Public Conference was Socio-Economic Impacts of Scientific and Technical Information within National Innovation Systems. The Keynote Address was given by Giles Rhéaume of the Conference Board, who spoke on Canada's Innovation Challenges. His presentation was followed by a presentation by ICSTI's (and CISTI's) contractor, Hussein Rostum, on the results of the study - The Information Imperative: Impacts of STM Information Organizations. Hussein had reviewed the literature on the impacts of information services over a long period and had spoken in detail to the sponsors. Amongst many other conclusions he had identified the challenges faced by STM information services suppliers.

Measuring STM impacts in regional innovation schemes was dicussed by Bernard Dumouchel and the Conference was completed by a range of presentations covering a number of innovative information services, economic impacts, and the challenges of the 'information society' especially in developing countries.

Under the business meetings several aspects of "Business Models," the impact of the traditional methods of STM publishing and distribution by new technologies and how they influence the economics of the process were discussed. The ideas included looking at how document delivery was affected, the costs and consequences of digital archiving, how to deal with 'pay per view' as compared to pay a subscription, licensing, IPR, and other legal and economic issues. There was also discussion on how these matters could be built in to the upcoming ICSTI schedule of meetings, that of January 2004 and the General Assembly in London, May 2004.

A visit of the CISTI library gave the participants an overview of its different services and its implications in the CNR national innovations projects.

2004 Winter Meeting

  • Economic Models for Scientific Information, Production and Distribution

At its meeting in Ottawa the Executive Board decided to organize a discussion session for the Winter Meeting limited to the membership representatives and some invited speakers setting the scene. The subject would be (economic) business models for information dissemination. This meeting would try to reflect the actual concerns of the membership and a first letter requesting the opinions of all members on which items should be particularly discussed and suggestions for speakers names was sent out by the Executive Director in September 2003. The programme was finalized by mid-December under the title The ‘Open’ Movement and the Economic Future of Science Publishing. The meeting took place in rooms graciously provided by the French Ministry of Science in Le Carré des Sciences in Paris. It convened 50 participants. Vivid discussions took place during the one and a half day meeting under the principle that no statements would be attributed. Soon after the meeting the Executive Director distributed to all Members a summary report on the topics discussed. The discussion was structured according to Economic Implications for primary and secondary publication in science, the economic future of Science publishing from the viewpoint of a publisher, an information manager and research funders. The overhead slides presented by the invited speakers are still posted on the Members Area of the ICSTI ( No proceedings of this meeting would be published but it was suggested that a list of pros and cons of the Open Access could be issued by ICSTI. Instead of this the Executive Board at its subsequent meeting decided that ICSTI would prepare a White Paper on the subject. The President and the Executive Director prepared such a paper for a first review by the Bureau in March 2004 to be submitted to the Executive Board at the London Meeting in May.