View - Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg

EDITORIAL
Working provisional copy - Pls do not circulate
This volume contains the papers presented at the Second Colloquium on
Future Professional Communication in Astronomy, which was held at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(USA) on April 13-14, 2010. This meeting provided an open forum to discuss
the state and evolution of professional communicating and in particular
publishing in astronomy.
The meeting was attended by 44 people representing nine different countries,
including representatives from the major astronomical publishers and
learned societies, editors, librarians, scientists, as well as archive and information
system managers.
The program included 19 lively talks covering a wide range of topics,
including: the state of the art in publishing and the role of learned societies,
the future of scholarly communication in the era of the web, communicating
astronomy to the public, the role of journals and archives in data curation
and preservation, the future of librarianship, bibliometrics and other evaluation
criteria, and scholarly recommendation systems.
The keynote speaker of the Colloquium was John Huchra, the Robert
O. & Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology and the Senior Advisor
to the Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University, who spoke about
“Astronomical Publishing, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” John revisited
the role of publishing in astronomy and asked the question “Why do
we publish,” setting the stage for a lively debate during the remainder of
the conference.
Publishers and officers of learned societies described their current efforts
and future plans to enrich the electronic scholarly papers, respond to open
access mandates, control costs, and collaborate with external archives to
provide valuable services to the astronomical community.
Scientists, librarians and archivists voiced their thoughts and desires
on wide-ranging topics including open access models, the evolving role of