Steve Hitchcock Steve HitchcockPhD (Southampton) 2002, BSc Hons (Warwick) 1981
First some general context for this work. My research interests are open access (OA), institutional repositories (IRs) and electronic publishing, especially Web publishing. I have related interests in user interfaces to information, information architecture and digital preservation, basically how to communicate electronic information effectively. I would like to think my work in these areas, going back to 1995, has contributed to the current status of these fields, particularly the great interest in OA and IRs.
Since 2005 I have been working as project manager on two projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC):
EPrints emerged from an earlier high-impact project for which I was again project manager, the Open Citation Project (1999-2002). This project was also responsible for first developing the still heavily-used Citebase impact ranking search engine.
Reinforcing my commitment to promoting and achieving open access, I maintain a bibliography on the open access impact advantage, an actively updated list of studies that show open access increases the impact of papers, as measured by citation counts.
For the same reason I am proud to have helped to organise international conferences on OA held in Southampton:
In between times I was briefly involved with the eBank UK project, which has produced important original work enabling e-science data to be added to IRs.
So how did I come to be working in the IAM Group at Southampton University? After spending too many years in academic journals and books publishing I decided to break from the narrow confines of commercial business to explore new ideas and innovative technologies, and to become involved with .... academic journals. I first joined IAM as a PhD student in 1994. As you have seen, my PhD thesis was not far removed from concerns about journals. To complete the circle, I worked on the Open Journal Project (1995-1998) in which we collaborated with a number of commercial and learned society publishers.
I have been fortunate these projects have been funded by JISC throughout this period, since the pioneering and exciting Electronic Libraries Programme (e-Lib) programme. So I am pleased to have the chance to give something back to the research community through JISC by serving on the Repositories & preservation advisory group, which supports programmes in these areas. Membership of this group led from a similar advisory role on an earlier programme, Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR).
In other activities, from 1997-2005 I was Development Editor for the Web-only Journal of Digital Information when it was based at Southampton University. We adopted an original multi-theme approach to exploit the new capabilities of electronic journals. My sign-off editorial reflected on the changes to e- journals through that period. The journal continues to be published from Texas A&M University. I served on the committee for the British Computer Society's Electronic Publishing specialist group from 1995 to 2000, leading programmes for technical meetings held by the group, on topics such as Designing Information for Mobile and Broadband Users, Web Database Publishing, and Innovations in Online Journal Publishing.
NEW! Digital Preservation Service Provider Models for Institutional Repositories: towards distributed services
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Jessie Hey and Leslie Carr
Submitted to D-Lib Magazine, February 2007
NEW! Preservation Metadata for Institutional Repositories: applying PREMIS
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Jessie Hey and Leslie Carr
Submitted to RLG DigiNews, February 2007
NEW! Survey of repository preservation policy and activity
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Jessie Hey and Leslie Carr
January 2007, to be submitted for publication
Preservation for Institutional Repositories: practical and invisible
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Jessie Hey and Leslie Carr
Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical Data (PV2005), Edinburgh, 21-23 November 2005, in e-Prints Soton, 1 December 2005
Open Access Citation Information
Rachel Hardy, Charles Oppenheim, Tim Brody and Steve Hitchcock
Report for JISC Committee for the Information Environment (JCIE) Scholarly Communications Group, September 2005, in ECS EPrints, 11 November 2005
The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies
Open Citation project, September 2004, ongoing
The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr and Stevan Harnad
Serials, Vol. 16, No. 3, November 2003, 255-260
Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based citation-ranked search and impact discovery service
Steve Hitchcock, Arouna Woukeu, Tim Brody, Leslie Carr, Wendy Hall and Stevan Harnad
Technical Report ECSTR-IAM03-005, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, in ECS EPrints, 19 September 2003
Metalist of Open Access Eprint Archives: the Genesis of Institutional Archives and Independent Services
ARL Bimonthly Report, No. 227, April 2003.
By providing a broad overview of the structure, size and progress of full-text open access eprint archives, this list of lists is intended to assist further quantitative research on the open access eprint phenomenon. See also this updated version of the core list.
Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward
Steve Hitchcock, Donna Bergmark, Tim Brody, Christopher Gutteridge, Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Carl Lagoze and Stevan Harnad
D-Lib Magazine, Volume 8 Number 10, October 2002
Story of the Open Citation Project, intertwined with the concurrent emergence of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
How Dynamic E-journals can Interconnect Open Access Archives
Steve Hitchcock and Wendy Hall
ICCC/IFIP 5th Conference on Electronic Publishing - ELPUB2001, Canterbury, UK, July 2001
First paper describing the motivations and functionality of Perspectives in Electronic Publishing, a new model electronic journal providing access to hundreds of full-text papers, commented and interlinked.
Developing
Services for Open Eprint Archives: Globalisation, Integration and the Impact
of Links
Steve Hitchcock, Les Carr, Zhuoan Jiao, Donna Bergmark, Wendy Hall,
Carl Lagoze and Stevan Harnad
5th ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, San Antonio, Texas,
June 2000
The first paper produced by the Open Citation project, and somewhat
ahead of the major results we hope to produce, the paper explores the prospects
for combining a number of powerful reference linking tools to have emerged
recently with some preliminary results. More significantly, perhaps, the
paper considers the convergence of information environments created by
digital libraries through the means of reference linking. As usual, some
provocative comments on how we might improve access to refereed papers.
A
Usage based Analysis of CoRR
A commentary on "CoRR: a Computing Research Repository" by Joseph Y.
Halpern
Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, Wendy Hall and Stevan Harnad
ACM SIGDOC Journal of Computer Documentation, May 2000
An invited response to an original paper by Halpern. We focus on the
innovative features of CoRR in terms of eprint archives, and try to explain
why it has yet to make the anticipated impact in terms of the number of
submissions the archive attracts. This analysis is based on a comparison
of submission figures for CoRR with those for the same initial stages of
the Los Alamos physics eprint archives. To succeed CoRR will need to build
stronger support within its target community.
Linking
Electronic Journals: Lessons from the Open Journal Project
Steve Hitchcock, Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Steve Harris, Steve Probets,
David Evans and David Brailsford
D-Lib Magazine, December 1998
The concluding paper on the Open Journal project. Assessing the achievements
of the project and considering some of the difficulties it faced, the paper
reports on the different approaches to linking that the project developed,
and summarises the important user responses that indicate what works and
what does not. Looking ahead, the paper reveals the first signs of moves
towards "distributed" journals, where information may be shared and documents
are built dynamically from different sources.
and a related paper
E-PRINT! Making
the Most of Electronic Journals
Steve Hitchcock, Les Carr and Wendy Hall
on The Computing Research Repository (CoRR)-part of the e-print archive
at Los Alamos, December 1998
Making the most of e-journals requires that a distinctive new publishing
model is developed. The paper presents evidence of a broadening demand
for comprehensive linked archives, raising questions about the common practice
of exclusive publication of most journal papers. Whether viewed from the
perspective of Open Journals or that of prospective e-journal users more
generally, we found the needs of the new publishing system for electronic
dissemination of academic papers to be the same; and the limitations of
the current system a severe constraint.
REVISED! Towards
Universal Linking for Electronic Journals
Steve Hitchcock, Freddie Quek, Leslie Carr, Wendy Hall, Andrew Witbrock
and Ian Tarr
Serials Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1998) 21-33
This is an updated and revised version of Linking
Everything to Everything: Journal Publishing Myth or Reality? which
was first presented at the ICCC/IFIP conference on Electronic Publishing
‘97: New Models and Opportunities, Canterbury, UK, April 1997.
Citation linking appears to be a straightforward concept but it is
enormously powerful. Coauthored with the publisher Electronic Press, the
paper anticipates the most demanding requirements for citation linking
and examines them in a real publishing context, describing hypermedia approaches
that can support this level of complexity.
Webs of Research:
Putting the User in Control
Steve Hitchcock, Robert Kimberley, Steve Harris, Leslie Carr and Wendy
Hall
presented at the conference IRISS'98, Internet Research and Information
for Social Scientists, Bristol, UK, March 1998.
Coauthored with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the
paper looks at two implementations of large-scale citation linking: ISI's
Web of Science, and the Open Journal of Cognitive Science produced by the
Open Journal project. These examples point to ways in which, as we move
towards truly distributed information environments, publishers can manage
data cooperatively.
Web Journals Publishing:
a UK Perspective
Steve Hitchcock, Leslie Carr and Wendy Hall
Serials, Vol. 10, No. 3, November 1997, 285-299
First presented at the 20th annual conference of the UK Serials
Group in Edinburgh, April 1997, and since published in the Group's
journal.
The popularity of the Web has accelerated the development of scholarly
e-journals since 1996. This new survey, realising a different perspective
from 'The Calm Before the Storm' (below), traces developments in the UK
from two schemes funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils: the Pilot
Site Licence Initiative and its dramatic effect on all journal publishers
in the UK, and the Electronic Libraries (eLib) development programme.
Citation Linking:
Improving Access to Online Journals
S. Hitchcock, L. Carr, S. Harris, J. M. N. Hey and W. Hall
presented at the Second ACM International Conference on Digital
Libraries, Philadelphia, USA, July 1997.
Now that most major publishers are committed to making their primary
journals available online, citation linking is the coming feature in journal
publishing. This paper says what it is, how and where it is happening and
presents a novel example.
ARL E-publishing article of the year 1996
A Survey
of STM Online Journals 1990-95: the Calm Before the Storm
Steve Hitchcock, Leslie Carr and Wendy Hall
in Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion
Lists, edited by D. Mogge, sixth edition, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Association
of Research Libraries), pp. 7-32.
An extensive survey and analysis of the state of electronic journal
publishing at the end of 1995, with links to over 100 full-text, peer-reviewed
journals in the areas of science, technology and medicine (STM).
ADDED! Citations
of this survey by other online sources. Where is current interest in
electronic journals heading? See this list for some pointers.
And a cautionary note:
The URL of this page is