Proceeding Along
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Letter from the President
Proceeding Along In a place of honor on the top shelf of my bookcase sits a row of blue books. Some are pristine, but several are dogeared with use. One, to my lasting pride, has my name on the spine. These are my Blue Books: my MRS Proceedings. The MRS Proceedings have an illustrious heritage, and they have been a critical piece of the Materials Research Society for many years. In the early days of MRS, they were both the chief record of the meetings and the financial bulwark of the Society. The Proceedings had a very high author participation (>65%), and so provided a complete (and very valuable) snapshot of an entire field. Almost all sold well, both to meeting attendees and to libraries. In the early 1980s, the average print run for each volume was over 500, with the best-sellers going well over this. MRS’s best-sellers include the 1987 highTc volume (Vol. 99, 1500 copies), the 1990 Better Ceramics through Chemistry IV (Vol. 180, 1100 copies), and the 1988 thinfilms book (Vol. 130, 1000 copies). These Blue Books obviously met a great need in the community. In addition, the profits from the Proceedings were an essential element of MRS’s financial operations through the 1980s, producing enough cash to help hold down meeting registration fees. Even in the 1990s, the Society could count on the Proceedings to average >65% author participation and print runs averaging >500. However, this strong history of the Proceedings runs counter to some background trends in scientific publishing. The book-on-the-shelf approach to scientific literature looks increasingly endangered. With the advent of electronic publishing, the ISI Science Citation Index is allimportant, and its rules for listing publications specifically exclude proceedings. This makes proceedings papers harder to find, and their value for many users is less than that of “real,” or “archival” (indexed), articles. (If the work is found and correctly cited, citations to proceedings will usually appear in an author’s citation index. This is critical, as the citation index is a yardstick by which many institutions try to quantify scientific merit for purposes such as promotion and tenure.) As a consequence of these and other trends, the level of author participation in MRS Proceedings has fallen from well
“The MRS Proceedings have an illustrious heritage... and 560,000 downloads”
over 65% (as recently as 1995–1999) to below 50% (2000–2003). The sales of printed books have dropped by about a factor of two, which is a result of competition and the decision by the Society several years ago to make on-line access to all Proceedings papers free to MRS members. Since the costs are largely fixed, this has transformed the “print” Proceedings from a money-spinner into an activity that breaks even at best. However, the Proceedings appear to have a new lease on life through newly available library subscriptions as well as member access. Over 12,000 papers are presently posted on the MRS publications Web site (www.mrs.org/publications/ epubs/proceed
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