I met my former McGraw-Hill colleague today for catch-up lunch meeting. He is now the Marketing Director of World Scientific, a Singapore-based company specializing in scientific publishing of both books and journals. The company has now offices in US, UK, Taiwan, HK, and China besides of course Singapore and a production arm in Chennai, India.
“All the referees, editors, and main writers are from the US,” he said. “We just add (to our journals) articles from Asian authors, not the other way around. People still consider scientists from the West have higher status and we leverage on that.”
Well, it is a public secret at best, but it’s amazing that a local Singapore company can do that and become one of the most influencial scientific publisher in the global scientific world. Well, actually several other Asian companies have done the same: publish for the developed countries’ scientists and then sell the product back to the West. On doing that they are doing some ‘good will’ including publishing our own Asian scientists’ papers. Hindawi Publishing from Egypt is one of them (journal) and Jaypee Brothers from India has done the same for health science books.
“How about scientific level in Indonesia?” he asked when I mentioned that I might pursue e-journal initiative starting with servicing university journals in the country.
That’s it!
We certainly still can not sell Asian researchs to the West. What we can do is merely providing paid hosting to them with additional services such as preparing proper English titles and English abstracts for their articles.
“You might end up like a production person then,” he said.
Sadly yes. Try to find a way to avoid the fate, though…
Anyway, we followed up our lunch meeting with something more tangible, that is on the possibility of selling World Scientific electronic journal contents in Indonesia. He mentioned Djakarta Raya as one of the candidate and I promised him to introduce him to my other friend who represents ProQuest in Indonesia.
“Maybe we can do something together,” that’s what my ProQuest friend told me when I contacted him on various opportunities. Maybe and hopefully…
Posted by Kosasih Iskandarsjah
