DFCs publishing legacy: Transitioning into the digital age with new services for, and request for participation of, Council members

Authors: Dean* Hendrickson, Edwin Phil Pister

Year: 2015 (xlvii)

Abstract

Since formation of the Desert Fishes Council in 1969, its mission has included rapid dissemination of information concerning activities of the Council and its members. Fulfillment of that mission began with the first formal meeting in 1970, and starting with that meeting, comprehensive reports on all meetings have been compiled and published in the Proceedings of the Desert Fishes Council (registered as ISSN 1068-0381). Though meetings have been consistently annual since 1970, the Council has never had paid staff and has always been dependent strictly on volunteer labor, with consequential variation in the rapidity and form of information dissemination via the Proceedings. Through the 1980s, paper copies of hand- or type-written records of meetings were reproduced and mailed to members. In 1992 Hendrickson became editor, adding Spanish translations of all abstracts and production of the Proceedings became computer-based, with online and emailed provision of text-based PDFs. Bound hard copies were still, however, sent via post to all members until around 2000 when distribution switched to email and downloading from the website, saving the Council thousands of dollars in annual printing and mailing charges. For a few years, bound hard copies were printed and shipped on demand by an online printer for a small fee, but few were sold. Eventually all pre-1992 issues were scanned to graphic-based pdfs and made available from the website as well. Translation being labor intensive and done by volunteers, dissemination of the content became less rapid. With savings resulting from ceasing to print and mail hard copies highly qualified translators were hired (at far below market rates) in 2000 to provide translations, but turnaround time from meeting to publication remained slow. Finally, after 20 years of bilingual publication, the Executive Committee decided in 2013 to discontinue translation following completion of the 2006 volume. The decision was based on the perception that, unlike the situation in the early 1990s when translation started, most Latin American biologists could read English quite well and translations were no longer as important for fulfillment of the Councils mission. Currently, all Proceedings from 1968-2006 are available as pdfs on the website. PDF content, however, is not all textual. Pre-1992 volumes are all graphic-based files and early attempts to OCR them produced high error rates. None of the content of the Proceedings is fully indexed on the web and their content is thus not easily discovered via standard web searches. New ways to publish this content to better expose it to Internet search engines are currently being tested. Abstracts from meetings after 2006 remain still unpublished in any way except in meeting programs, but publication of them will soon be prototyped using Google fusion tables. This experimental way of publishing may change in future, but the work flow to get the content from the DFC abstract database into this system appears to be sustainable and there is great potential via fusion tables to involve the membership in tagging and further normalizing and indexing the content to better integrate it into the semantic / linked web of the future. It should also be possible, once they are taxonomically indexed, to link all abstracts to the species tracking tables that DFC Area Coordinators have been working on. In its early years, the Proceedings occasionally included full papers that followed up on content presented at meetings, but the last issues to include full papers were the first three computer-produced volumes (1992-1994). Full papers published in the Proceedings were never peer reviewed, but discussions at meetings over the years have repeatedly suggested that DFC should publish a journal. It has also been repeatedly suggested that DFC publish the digital files from meeting presentations. Volunteer time and expertise limitations have prevented action on either suggestion, but at its summer 2015 meeting the DFC Executive Committee agreed to explore new forms of online publication that might expand dissemination beyond publication of just the abstracts from meetings. As a result, DFC now has a place where anyone can quickly publish both presentations given at meetings (not peer reviewed but requiring acceptance by DFC editors) or fully peer-reviewed original papers on any content related to DFCs mission. This is accomplished through a DFC channel (http://f1000research.com/channels/desertfishcouncil) in a system provided by F1000 (Faculty of 1000), a long-established, international group focusing on open publication and scientific information dissemination. This system allows for rapid and fully open and permanent publication of content by authors with minimal effort required of DFC. F1000 will manage all peer review via an automated system that will hopefully be facilitated by DFC members signing up to serve as reviewers. The entire review process is totally open, with reviewers comments and authors responses openly published verbatim. All publications (including presentations) are assigned DOIs so they are easily found by standard web searches and are fully integrated into that global web indexing, permanent archiving and citation- and impact-tracking system. Authors get fully citable and tracked rapid publication, and reviewers have verifiable records of their contributions to the process. Publication of poster and oral (called slides in F1000) presentations is free and takes no more than 5 minutes, but can only be done by the authors themselves, who choose how they wish to license their content. Anyone wishing to publish a complete paper (peer reviewed) through the F1000 system will pay 50% of the normal (currently $150 for short contributions) publication fee if they have previously published in the DFC channel. This looks to be a sustainable, primarily author-driven system with considerable potential to help DFC continue to fulfill its mission to rapidly disseminate its content far beyond its historic audience, but success will clearly be dependent on author and reviewer participation. We encourage all presenters of content at meetings to upload their presentations to the DFC channel, and (then entitled to the 50% discount) to consider also publishing additional relevant content via the peer-reviewed option.