Bernard Aleva

Five Quick Questions

Bernard Aleva, Managing Director, Engineering Publishing, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Bernard is managing director of Elsevier’s global engineering business, comprising materials science and engineering publishing, Elsevier Advanced Technology and Elsevier Engineering Information (Ei). He has been in the industry for 15 years, with Elsevier since 1995 and recently returned to the Netherlands after three years in the US, first as CEO of Ei, and most recently as CEO of Elsevier MDL. Bernard has an MSc in Biomedical Sciences from Utrecht University, Netherlands.

1. Can you sum up the biggest changes you’ve seen since you started working in publishing?

The transition made by the STM publishing industry from a print to an electronic environment is an impressive one, and one that has opened up many possibilities both for content and for those who use it. In the old days, the end of an article was where that piece of content finished — no connection to anything else beyond a literature reference. Now that same piece of content in this new data environment is just one small unit in a huge, connected dataset. Today, there exist almost endless possibilities for making relationships between that piece of content and any other. This is the basis of the biggest change we are experiencing.

For our customers there are clearly enormous gains to be made in this new reality in terms of accessibility and usability, better service, higher speed of availability of information, not to mention the opportunities presented to be creative with content in ways not previously possible.

2. From a publisher's perspective, what do you see as some of the greatest outcomes of online publishing?

Access to more content is now available to more concurrent users. Publishers have made enormous advancements, not just in increasing accessibility to current content but also to content that was previously inaccessible, or at best archived so far away that no one could really see it anymore. As an example, Elsevier's investments in digitization of journal back files have opened up a window on the past that many researchers might not otherwise have had available to them.

In the print world librarians were faced with the difficulty of determining whether their journals were being used, now publishers have been able to make this information readily available to them for analysis and decision-making.

The digital environment also provides opportunities to develop, strengthen, and integrate databases and navigation offerings and we see all-science platforms such as Scopus and subject databases like Engineering Village 2, Compendex, EMBASE, and DiscoveryGate — a platform offering structure- as well as text-searching.

3. Have you noticed a change in the expectations of authors and editors? What demands are they making on Elsevier that they haven’t made in the past?

Generally speaking there has been a huge increase in expectations from authors and editors, especially in terms of speed and quality of service. Our customers naturally expect us to immediately deliver anything they imagine should be possible given the technologies at hand. In response we now provide electronic submission services, known as the Elsevier Editorial System (EES), for more than 500 journals and plan to roll these out to almost all of our journals by the end of 2006. The experience of editors involved to date, in terms of the value this service provides as part of the peer review process has, been incredibly positive. The addition of online administrative support to editors, once live with EES, has been welcomed very positively too.

Another need authors and editors have, and that we have been able to fulfill, is faster publication. The implementation of ‘Articles in Press’ on ScienceDirect has significantly increased speed to electronic publication making peerreviewed articles that have been accepted for publication in our journals available online as uncorrected or corrected proofs before they appear in print.

One particular expectation of our authors is that we should be able to tell them, at any point in time, where their paper is in the production process. Elsevier’s Author Gateway services do exactly that and are extremely well-used.

In addition, our Author Feedback Program has been in place since 1999 and we monitor very closely what our authors think about us. It is clearly important that we continue to meet or exceed author requirements — it is a competitive world.

4. On a practical level, how have these changes affected the way staff, working in your publishing teams, interact with their authors and editors?

The work environment here is changing a lot. If you look at how publishing editors communicate with the editorial community now it’s more frequent, quicker. It’s much easier to share ideas with more people simultaneously and pick up feedback and response to those ideas. As a result, our interaction with the scientific community is much more intense.

5. Looking into your crystal ball, what comes into view for publishers into the future?

In most communities the need for the peer-review system remains — that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Elsewhere, many things have changed and will keep changing very rapidly. The availability of scientific content outside of traditional publishers’ platforms has changed a lot and in future I think we’ll see the scientific article available in many different formats and on a variety of platforms.

The more growth we see in availability of the same content in differing formats, the more chaos will enter into the equation, and the more important it will be to be certain you are looking at the definitive version of that content. Then, the role of the publisher becomes possibly even more important than it currently is.

But, that is only if we are talking about the future based on where we are now, and with the scientific article as we currently know it. In the crystal ball there is much more: integration of content with different content, visualization of data, navigation, relationships between content entities and extracted entities from other content, text-mining, workflow systems to help researchers save time and increase quality.

In the future, we’ll see more ‘value-added’ content on top of the ‘primary’ content we know today. There will be less focus on the scientific article as a content element and more focus on integration — on being able to draw conclusions from relationships between different data sets rather than simply reading an article.

I believe the roles of the publisher and the librarian will become more important than ever. The key role of both is to help users navigate through the expanding information universe and help them select the most valuable and relevant pieces of content, thereby improving the efficiency of the research process. Indeed, the life of the librarian may become more challenging as they deal with an increasing number of players and information types. In my crystal ball close symbiosis between publisher and librarian will remain extremely important.

Researchers Speak Up

I appreciate libraries because…

… they are at the forefront of the information age and the business of education.
William Osei, Associate Professor of Geography, Algoma University College, Sault St. Marie, Ontario, Canada.

 ... they allow people to touch everything that makes us who we are and who we will be.
Eric P. Giese, University of Wisconsin Sheboygan/Madison, Sheboygan/Madison, WI, USA

 … they provide a wealth of information.
Jonathan Lieb, Associate Professor of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahasee, FL, USA

 … they are storehouses of knowledge.
Lynn Resler, Assistant Professor of Geography, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

 … they know how to find relevant information.
Blase Rezndov, Biosciences Tech, USGS, NRMSC, West Glacier, MT, USA

 ... they provide services and information that make my job easier.
John S. Oldham, Project Manager, Oncology, PPD Inc., Wilmington, NC, USA