KMi was invited to present its innovative Journal of Interactive Media in Education to an expert conference, Change & Continuity in Scientific Publishing, convened under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Simon Buckingham Shum joined other Editors of leading electronic journals covering diverse disciplines to share experiences, and discuss future directions for evolving scholarly publishing and peer review.

JIME, and its underlying D3E Web document publishing and discussion system (due for open source release this summer) were received with great interest, provoking debate on the pros and cons of open peer review, and whether it may work better in some disciplines than others.

Highlights included a preliminary report from the British Medical Journal on their experiments with open peer review (moving towards a transparent, conversational approach very close to that pioneered by JIME since 1996), descriptions of the extent to which the astronomical research community has moved to digital encoding of its datasets, the incorporation of non-textual materials in journals, and lively debate on the relationship between scientific journal publishers and recent developments such as the Open Archives Initiative.