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Martin Tanke
Happy New Year! As we enter our new millennium’s second decade, on behalf of everyone at Elsevier, I offer Library Connect Newsletter readers best wishes for a year of opportunity and achievement.
Now, here’s an achievement I’d like to call to your attention: This issue marks the beginning of the eighth year of publication of the Library Connect Newsletter.
That may seem hard to believe, but here’s something even harder to believe: After centuries of development of scholarly publishing systems, we’re all still obsessed with how to define and identify “trusted content.” Why is this?
Blaming the Web for our continuing obsession with trusted content seems like an easy out, but there’s no way around identifying the Web as a force affecting whether we decide to trust particular sources of scholarly communication. With the advent of online communication, not only are we accessing more communication, but we’re dealing with more sources and more opportunity for exchange of truths and untruths. Considering scholarly publication, in particular, we’re taking what’s a challenging proposition to begin with, and magnifying the challenges by an order of magnitude.
Prior to online communication, scholarly publishing was what it remains today: A record of findings offering not absolute truths but rather knowledge to be trusted until superseded by superior knowledge. Given online communication, scholarly publishing has entered an exciting new state, when information professionals, researchers, scientists, authors and publishers are benefiting from more voices and collaboration; trying experiments to determine how best to harness the Web to improve scholarly publishing; and throughout seeking to continue to stamp “trusted content” where deserved.
So what are Elsevier and our partners doing, to help guide the evolution of trusted content? And how are information professionals and researchers addressing the issue of trust, as they cope with the avalanche of sources?
For answers to those questions, and for discussion of other aspects of “trusted content,” let’s turn to this issue’s contributors. Turn these pages, and you’ll hear from authors including:
- Clifford Lynch, talking about trustworthiness in the networked information system;
- Tracey Brown, talking about authors’ and reviewers’ views of peer review;
- Carol Anne Meyer, talking about the CrossRef initiatives CrossCheck and CrossMark;
- Peter Shepherd, talking about COUNTER and SUSHI; and
- Lotta Janson, talking about how information literacy instruction remains important.
Please join me in thanking all contributors to this issue. And now, happy reading!
Regards,
Martin Tanke
Managing Director Journal Publishing, Science & Technology,
Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
m.tanke@elsevier.com
