Strategic Issues in University Management

In this paper we will discuss developments in the field of scientific information with the aim to determine and analyse some of the pertinent strategic issues related to higher education (HE) as seen from the stakeholder perspective of the university and its management

Visualisation of the information resources for cell biology

Intelligent multimodal interfaces can facilitate scientists in utilising available information resources. Combining scientific visualisations with interactive and intelligent tools can help create a “habitable” information space. Development of such tools remains largely iterative. We discuss an ongoing implementation of intelligent interactive visualisation of information resources in cell biology

University-publisher relationship revisited : ,Policy statement by academic libraries on the pricing of scholarly journals'

The consortium of Dutch universities, the Dutch Royal Library and the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information have summer 1999 developed and implemented a new strategy in its relationship to scientific publishing houses. The gist of the strategy is that the consortium in discussing license agreements for scholarly journals has given priority to fundamental strategic issues over negotiating financial terms. Fundamental issues include copyright and exploitation rights in relation to university (pre-print) document servers, and experimenting with new business models for a distributed electronic publishing environment. Such a business model should take into account cashflow both ways between universities and publishers. The strategy will be discussed in detail and first negotiation results of negotiations with main publishers will be reported

Managing a portal of digital web resources by content syndication

As users become more accustomed to continuous Internet access, they will have less patience with the offering of disparate resources. A new generation of portals is being designed that aids users in navigating resource space and in processing the data they retrieved. Such portals offer added value by means of content syndication: the effort to have multiple, federated? resources co-operate in order to profit optimally from their synergy. A portal that offers these advantages, however, can only be of lasting value if it is sustainable. We sketch a way to set up and run an organisation that can manage a content syndication portal in a sustainable way.\ud \u

Forces and functions in scientific communication: an analysis of their interplay

This article deals with the transformation of the familiar, linear scientific information chain into an interactive scientific communication “network” in response to concomitant changes in scientific research and education. Societal conditions are seen to lead worldwide to the concept of strategic research: research dominated by "economy of scope". Strategic research leads to transnational research enterprises - universities and other research institutions - with a focus on return of research capital investment, and thus on intellectual capital. This development calls for new ways of knowledge management that in turn has consequences for scientific communication. The scientific communication market is described in terms of four main forces and their interplay. These forces are the actors (the author/reader pair), accessibility, content, and applicability. Scientific communication is described in terms of its four functions: registration, awareness, certification and archive. These forces and functions allow a structural analysis of the scientific communication market and allow to discuss aspects of structural continuity in e.g. describing the transformation from a paper-based system to communication in an electronic environment. The developments in research are seen to emphasise the already existing autonomous development of a "unified archive". Also these developments lead us to review certification policies to include elements external to research and to consider new structures for communication, and publications. The new structures are a result of the interactions in the market as described by the forces and the functions. The distinction between formal and informal communication is seen to become less useful. The need to review the structure and organisation of the market becomes evident, in particular if we consider communication during research as well. This leads us to speculate if elements of the virtual organisation are of relevance. Finally, the need for a coherent research programme on scientific communication is discussed