Living Reviews

Innovative Resources for Scholarly Communication Bridging Diverse Spheres of Disciplines and Organisational Structures

Claus Dalchow, Michael Nentwich, Patrick Scherhaufer, Christina Weyher

Overview

• Editorial Concept
• Features
• Spreading out

Editorial Concept

• Review articles
  • highlights on current research
  • evaluative commentary on essential techniques and concepts
  • point out challenges for future research
  • guide users through important literature and online resources
• commissioned by international editorial board
• subject to peer review
• updated, kept current by their authors
• target group: scientific community above graduate level
• open access service

How to keep an article alive (1)

Major updates

• core of 'living' concept
• substantial revision of article to reflect progress in the field, by:
  • review recent developments, covering new aspects of field
  • reworking entire piece, adding/modifying sections, adding new material, extending reference list, ...
• editorial: subject to full peer review, new publication number
• side effects: author team or article focus may change
• aim: major updates every 2-3 years, but...

Article History

How to keep an article alive (2)

Fast-track-revisions / Annual Updates

• avoid building up backlog of new developments
• lower barrier for authors to keep their articles alive
• 'lightweight' updates, short notices of current research results, trends and developments, or important publications
• editorial: reviewed by subject editor
• all changes documented in detail in the article
• technical: special macros to mark up changes
• detailed changelog in all article versions

Changelog for Fast-Track Revision

Online Features

• HTML, PDF
• special navigation support for special structures
• include additional material
  • figures
  • animations, movies
  • program code
  • ...
• very well integrated in the web

Article interface

Reference tracking

Navigation support for Figures

References

• editorial policy: only cited references
• collected in refDB
• crosslinks from refdb entries back to citing context in article
  --> How was this work evaluated?
• various export options
• make data available to other services

Reference Database

Reference Database

Living Reviews Journal Family (1)

• (*1998)
  • Max Planck Institute for Gravitional Physics
  • 'prototype' journal
• (*2003)
  • Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
  • similar publishing culture as LRR
  • extensive use of multimedia features

Living Reviews Journal Family (2)

• (*2004)
  • editorial office in Vienna, affilliated with eu research projects CONNEX and NEWGOV
  • field: contributions from political science, sociology, law
  • reviews are not common
  • editorial and technical adaptions
• (*2005)
  • Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) e. V. Müncheberg
  • 'landscape research' as field relatively new, fragmented, following disciplinary lines
  • LRLR to become reference point for new field
• ... more to come!

Organisational Structure

• Central LivRev Project (Heinz Nixdorf Center for Information Management in the Max Planck Society)
  • sw development
  • provide central publishing infrastructure
  • manage extension of journal family
• Local Editorial Offices

Lessons learned

• provide quality control
• be open access
• be visible and accessible
• get the right (enthusiastic) people
• take into account: 2-3 years from initial idea to first publications

Starting new journals..

• We can offer:
  • Help and Advise
  • Publishing Infrastructure
  • Publishing Tools
• Thank you very much for your attention!
• Get in touch: contact@livingreviews.org