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a note on electronic publications
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Date: Tue, 16 Apr 96 05:36 EDT From: amo@research.att.com Subject: a note on electronic publications
The enclosed note was written at the invitation of the Euromath Bulletin, as an update to my article "Tragic loss or good riddance: The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals" (reference [Odl] below). It also discusses some general issues of electronic commerce.
Comments are invited.
Andrew Odlyzko
On the road to electronic publishing
Andrew Odlyzko AT&T Research amo@research.att.com
Preliminary version, April 15, 1996
1. Introduction
Publishing is moving rapidly into the digital age. However, the transition has just started, many players are reluctant participants, and neither the final shape of the industry nor the path there are clear. It is certain that evolution could be much faster, and great increases in efficiency and effectiveness of communication could be achieved. As a simple example, little of the older printed material is being digitized, although in most scientific and technological areas, all the published material could be made available in electronic form for under 5% of the annual world-wide spending for journals in those areas. As another example, Mike Lesk has pointed out that the costs of just the buildings of the new British Library in London and the new French National Library in Paris are two or three times higher than the costs of converting their book collections to a digital format. In a more rational world, the money going into bricks and mortar would have gone into scanning the books, which would have provided much more rapid and convenient access to the data for scholars. The physical volumes themselves could be housed in cheap warehouses, for the rare occasions when they might have to be consulted. However, user resistance to new media, copyright constraints, and the politicians' and the public's liking for visible edifices make it hard to take that step.
This note contains my personal impressions of the evolution of publishing, especially that of scholarly journals. It is an update of the earlier essay [Odl]. It is not a thorough study of electronic publishing, and the reader is referred to [PeekN] and other sources (including those listed in the references) for more complete information. I am presenting only some impressions, comments, and predictions. Stress is placed on the economics of publishing, with extensive discussion of possible developments in electronic commerce, since it is economic pressures that are driving the evolution of scholarly publications.
2. The stage of denial is over
As recently as a year ago, there were many publishers, librarians, and scholars who thought that electronic publishing was just a passing fad. There was much muttering about how "the true hidden costs of the Internet" would show up and strangle new electronic publications. Such allegations are mostly gone, as it has become apparent that the Internet is here to stay and grow for reasons much more compelling than scholarly communications, and that its costs are not high and are dropping rapidly. It may well be true that the Internet is about to suffer a catastrophic collapse, as Bob Metcalfe and others have been predicting, and that new charging schemes may have to be introduced to provide better service. However, that would only be a temporary glitch in the evolution of the digital world.
There is still concern about durability of electronic information. This concern is largely unjustified. Magnetic tapes, and even current optical disks, do not last long. However, it is possible to produce extremely durable digital storage media. For example, the HD-ROM recording technology, developed at Los Alamos, can attain storage densities over 100 times those of current CD-ROMs, and, by using materials such as stainless steel or iridium, can guarantee stability for tens of thousands of years, and provide resistance to fire, water damage, rats, and other disasters that can destroy paper data. Since storage densities are increasing rapidly, however, there is no point in using such long-lasting storage methods. If 10 years from now we will be able to store 100 times as much data at the same cost, why pay extra for any medium that provides stability beyond 10 years? As has been argued forcefully by Douglas Van Houweling [VanH], it is only information that we need to store, not any particular physical embodiment of information.
There are also wide concerns about standards for presentation, indexing, and storage. While there are many problems to be solved, they are not overwhelming. Existing programs for converting between .ps, .gif, .jpeg, and other graphic formats are far superior to programs that translate Latin into English, for example. Yet there is not much concern about information being presented in only a single human language, and few people advocate returning to the exclusive use of Latin for scholarly communication. Formats such as PostScript or HTML are simple to specify (at least when compared to natural languages), and are not likely to be forgotten. Even if they were to be forgotten, they would be easy to decode again. There may well be need in the future for specialists in dealing with obscure features of old formats, but is that different from the current academic scene, where we have specialists in Early Medieval English, or in the Mandarin Chinese of the Tang Dynasty?
It is generally accepted that standards problems will be solved, and that electronic publishing of scholarly material is inevitable. Most major publishers have big electronic ventures, and some now offer all their journals in electronic formats. Within half a dozen years, practically all current publications are likely to be available in electronic form.
3. Evolution is slow
There is rapid proliferation of electronic scholarly journals. The ARL survey [ARL] found 74 peer-reviewed electronic journals at the beginning of 1994, and 142 a year later. By now, this number is bound to be several times higher, since many established print journals have come out with electronic versions in the last year, whereas the 1994 ARL list included primarily journals that had been founded in electronic format only. However, even 1,000 electronic journals would be a tiny fraction of all refereed scholarly journals. Therefore, as far as most scholars are concerned, not much has changed. Most journal articles that they read come from printed issues, and most submissions for publication are intended for traditional journals. The new electronic versions of established journals have not attracted much attention, and the new purely electronic journals are not deluged with submissions. (See [HarterK] for a recent study of electronic journals that documents their slight impact to date, and some of the problems of accessing them.) Those expecting almost instantaneous shift towards electronic journals have been disappointed.
The gradual evolution towards electronic journals is not surprising. It is common for transition to a new technology to take many years. Even the compact disk took a decade to displace the vinyl disk. We do have examples of extremely fast transitions, such as the emergence of the World Wide Web, and then of Mosaic. In scholarly information dissemination, Ginsparg's server took over as the main method for preprint distribution in high energy theoretical physics in less than a year. However, those were exceptions, in which the new method offered a clearly superior solution to a serious problem, and where the transition did not involve much effort. For example, the physicists in Ginsparg's field had already developed a culture of massive preprint distribution, so a switch to his preprint server involved a minor change in their procedures, and yet saved them time and money. In general, authors, who control where scholarly material gets published, do not get much benefit from electronic journals, as will be discussed at greater length later.
4. Electronic commerce, or how does one make money on the Internet?
One often hears the lament that nobody is making money on the Internet. On the other hand, there are also many rosy predictions about rapid development of electronic commerce (ecommerce), with electronic shopping malls and intelligent software "agents" scouring the Net for the best deals for consumers.
The current situation and the future appear to be much more complicated. Online services have revenues in the billions of dollars (most in the financial information area, but with substantial sums in legal and other fields as well). They do not use the Internet yet, but they might switch to it as their delivery vehicle. In any case, they provide a successful model of profitable electronic trade in information goods. However, they are mostly restricted to certain professional services where their value is easily appreciated. The complaints about not knowing how to make money on the Internet refer largely to the mass market. Many newspapers and magazines have electronic editions, but have not yet figured out how to make them profitable. There are frequent complaints that the lack of security on the Internet is what inhibits ecommerce. However, those security problems are likely to be solved soon (not completely, but sufficiently to allay most concerns) through implementation of known cryptographic techniques. In any case, these problems are much exaggerated, since current credit card payment systems are adequate for most purposes, even for Internet purchases. A more serious inhibition to the growth of ecommerce is probably the lack of convincing economic models of how to conduct it.
Ecommerce is often predicted to promote "friction-free capitalism," in which various overhead and middlemen costs are eliminated. Someone wishing to purchase a VCR might send an "intelligent agent" into the Internet to collect bids from suppliers for a unit that meets desired specifications, and then select the best choice. While such a vision will be feasible technically, it is extremely unlikely to be dominant. The general tendency in the marketplace is to avoid "commoditization," where price is the only consideration. Ford does not compete with Honda in producing the most inexpensive Accord, but rather sells the Taurus as a substantially different alternative. In some cases commoditization is hard to resist. Sometimes it is because consumers learn there is little to differentiate products. As an example, oil companies have pretty much given up on trying to convince people that gasoline differs in anything other than octane ratings. In other cases, commoditization is forced on an industry by government edict or effective private monopoly. Intel and Microsoft have reduced the IBM-compatible PC industry to a commodity business, in which they collect almost all the profits, and the other players scramble to find a niche that will enable them to do more than just break even. However, those are the exceptions. The general ecological principle is towards evolution of species that fill different roles. Zebras do not attempt to compete with giraffes, but exploit a different part of the ecosystem, and evolution does not lead to a convergence of those two species. Similarly, in the world of business, companies try to differentiate their products. Workstation producers could never in the past agree on a common version of Unix, even under the threat of being overwhelmed by PCs, since that would have required giving up their distinctiveness that bound them to their customers. Even airlines, which are basically in the commodity business of moving people from one city to another, try to differentiate themselves through frequent flier plans and special pricing schemes.
Ecommerce is likely to lead to a proliferation of pricing plans that will seem to most people to be much more frustrating and less rational than even today's airlines. There will probably be a niche market for people who care most about their convenience, and will use their intelligent agents to do their shopping for them. However, what Sony, for example, might do is sell to that market only models of VCRs that are not available elsewhere, and are hard to compare to those sold in other places. Stores that have physical buildings are likely to serve a different clientele, and might also take further steps to differentiate themselves to prevent comparison shopping, which will be much easier with many people sharing their experiences on the Internet. There is likely to be a proliferation of frequent-shopper plans. Further, Sony VCRs sold in Sears stores might be slightly different from those sold in WalMart, and model numbers and features might change rapidly to inhibit consumer rating services (such as Consumer Reports, or various Internet-based group-rating schemes that are beginning to develop). There are already artificial barriers to free information flow. Grocery stores routinely bar employees of other stores from collecting extensive data on prices, and most of the Internet CD sellers prevent robots from collecting prices for comparison shopping. We can expect more such barriers.
Trade on the Internet in information goods, such as movies, music, and scholarly publications, is likely to involve pricing and distribution schemes that will seem even further removed from the popular conception of a "just price." The reason is that with distribution costs negligible, only the "first copy" cost of creating a work will matter. This will create novel possibilities in the search for maximal profits (which in such situations will correspond to maximal revenues). (Those offended by discussion of profits, especially the adherents of the theory that "information should be free," can think instead of an artist who is trying to obtain enough for her graphical creations to avoid starvation. Economically it comes to the same thing.)
Two of the most important factors that are likely to affect trade in information goods are bundling and differential pricing. Hal Varian [Varian] discusses them in detail, and argues convincingly that they will be very important. Bundling consists of offering several goods together in a single package, such as combining a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program in a software suite (such as Microsoft Office), or else printing many stories in a single newspaper. When dealing with physical goods, bundling often makes intuitive sense, since there are obvious economies in production and distribution. It would be prohibitively expensive for the New York Times, say, to distribute 100 little sheets, each one with a separate story, and having readers buy just the ones they were interested in. The accepted wisdom is that ecommerce will lead to just that, with readers selecting and paying for individual stories. It will certainly be possible to do so, as micropayment systems are being developed that will allow for processing of tiny transactions, such as payment for a single story in the New York Times, or a single "hit" on some aspiring poet's Web page that contains his sonnets. However, the economic argument is that while such schemes might exist, and may be used in some situations, they will not be dominant, and that we are likely to see more bundling than now. The reason is that bundling allows the producer to increase revenues by capturing more of the "consumer surplus" that arises when customers pay less than they are willing to do. U.S. airline prices are as confusing and frustrating as they are because the airlines are attempting to charge close to the consumers' willingness to pay, with low prices for discretionary vacationers, and high ones for business travelers. The confusion and frustration come about because the airlines do not have an easy way to distinguish between those two classes of consumers. Trade in information goods will have this same problem. There will be high fixed costs, practically no incremental costs, and a uniform price will usually have to be set for all. Bundling can then be used to capture some of the "consumer surplus." For example, suppose we were dealing with a proposal to start a newspaper that would have two sections, a business page and a sports page. Suppose also that there were just two potential readers, Alice and Bob. Suppose also that Alice needs to keep up with the business world, and so is willing to pay $0.50 for the business page, but only $0.25 for the sports page, since she does not particularly care about sports, but might like to keep up with lunchtime conversations. Suppose that Bob's preferences are reversed, in that he is an eager sports fan, willing to pay $0.50 for the sports page, but only $0.25 for the business page, since all he cares about is occasionally checking on his retirement fund. Under those conditions, how should the proposed newspaper be priced? If each section is sold separately, then a price of $0.25 for each will induce both Alice and Bob to buy both sections, for total revenues of $1.00. If the price is set at $0.50 for each section, then Alice will buy only the business page, and Bob only the sports page, for total revenue of $1.00 again. On the other hand, if the two sections are bundled together, then a price for both of $0.75 will induce both Alice and Bob to purchase the newspaper, and will produce total revenues of $1.50. Thus the economically rational step is not to offer the two sections separately, but only together.
Toy models like the one above are fun to play with, and help illustrate the advantages to producers of bundling. However, what happens in the real marketplace, with a variety of customers and competitors, and where there is already much experience with a variety of marketing plans? What we see there is extensive evidence of bundling. In many situations, such as that of physical newspapers, there is an obvious motivation for bundling in order to reduce costs. However, there is also evidence of bundling's success when there are practically no physical costs involved. Software suites such as Microsoft Office are just one example, as is the spread of site licensing of software packages. Internet service providers with flat access fees are growing much faster than traditional online service providers such as America on Line and Prodigy, which charge by the hour. Cable TV does not charge for each channel separately, but for packages (bundles) of them. Finally, the big and profitable online information services in the financial and legal arena, such as Reuters, Bloomberg, and Lexis, all operate on a subscription basis. Thus it appears likely that in the electronic world we will see extensive bundling, and information services will tend to be sold on a subscription basis more than piecemeal. Even when the technology to provide video-on-demand economically does arrive, it is likely that services will be subscription-based, and not pay-per-view. Similarly, in software, where there is much talk about network computers that will download small applications, past experience with pay-per-use is discouraging, and suggests that micropayments will not play a major role.
The other major factor that is likely to influence ecommerce, and is also discussed extensively in [Varian], is charging different prices to different consumers. A producer of information goods would like to charge according to the consumer's willingness to pay, but the consumer will usually be reluctant to reveal such information. However, it is sometimes possible to correlate willingness to pay with other features. Airlines offer much cheaper tickets for those willing to be away from home on Saturday night, on the theory that business travelers, who are willing to pay a lot, will not be willing to put up with such inconvenience. In information services, online services such as Prodigy and CompuServe offer stock market quotes that are delayed by 15 or 20 minutes for no extra cost, beyond the basic subscription. Real-time quotes uniformly cost extra, on the theory that those who need them for their trading will pay more. We are likely to see many more examples of such differential pricing. Electronic publications may offer high-resolution versions at one price, a lower-resolution version at a lower one, and in some cases they might offer a fax-quality version at no charge. There are also likely to be differentials based on timeliness, as with stock market quotes; old issues might be offered at low or no charge.
Some of the pricing schemes that are likely to evolve will require legislation to be effective, just as the airline pricing schemes survive largely because of laws that restrict usage of tickets to those who first buy them. Such legislative protection is likely to be enacted, as the proposed changes in copyright laws would give copyright holders almost complete control over the usage of their works. (Some of the proposed changes are so draconian, see [Samuelson], that they will presumably be modified, but the general trend is to strengthen copyright protection in order to encourage production of information goods.)
While the Internet does offer ways to improve delivery of medical and legal services, we should not expect a decrease in demand for lawyers. There will be many new opportunities to exercise their trade. It is reported, for example, that "in preparing a commemorative CD-ROM for the 500th anniversary of the first Columbus voyage to America, IBM spent over $1M clearing rights, of which only about $10K went to the rights holders; everything else went into administrative and legal fees" [Lesk]. Many corporations reports that monitoring software usage to comply with licensing terms costs just as much as the software itself. There are systems under development for automatic tracking of licenses and fees, but the economic logic may militate against their use, and overheads associated with ecommerce may end up much higher than the ones we complain right now in trade in physical goods.
5. Electronic publishing of scholarly journals
The preceding section discussed likely trends in the evolution of electronic commerce. For scholarly journals, though, the crucial question is whether any of those trends are relevant, or whether, as was predicted in [Odl] and other places, the present expensive journals will collapse and be replaced by free or almost-free electronic journals to be produced largely by scholars themselves. That question will be discussed in greater detail later. In any event, if such a collapse occurs, it will not be for several more years. In this section we will concentrate on the current situation, and in particular on what commercial publishers might try to do.
Some of the major trends predicted above to dominate ecommerce are visible in scholarly publishing. Bundling was always a significant feature, although usually not recognized as such. After all, having a copy of a journal in a library, where it is available to everybody on campus, is a form of bundling, just as putting articles into journal issues is. This approach is also dominant with the commercial electronic journals. Most provide access to anybody from a machine on a particular campus. Although some publishers talk about attempting to attract individual subscribers, there is no evidence this is likely to succeed. On the other hand, there may be more extensive bundling by publishers, with journals being offered only in groups, which might at least temporarily gain an advantage for some publishers.
Differential pricing has been a feature of scholarly publications for a long time, in that library subscription rates are almost uniformly several times higher than those for individuals. This is also likely to continue. We are also seeing some journals making their back issues available in electronic format. Some journals (such as Security Reviews and the mathematics journals available through [EMIS]) provide free access only to older issues. There are even journals (see [EMIS]) that provide free electronic access to current issues, while charging for print versions. It is not clear whether this is a viable strategy even in the intermediate term, since the availability of free electronic version might lead to cuts in subscriptions.
The practice of making old issues of a subscription electronic journal available for free seems attractive. A major concern of scholars and librarians is the guaranteed availability of an electronic journal. When a library purchases a book or printed journal, it can keep it forever (or at least until it gets lots, stolen, or damaged). What happens to an electronic journal when the publisher goes out of business? If at least old issues are made freely available, they can be archived at multiple sites, and their preservation assured.
In general, scholarly journals have not as yet been significantly affected by electronic publications. The stock price of Reed Elsevier dropped when an article in a business magazine claimed its academic publishing operation was going to be the Internet's first victim [Hayes]. However, soon thereafter the share price recovered, and Reed Elsevier reported a substantial increase in profits (which, for its academic publishing division, were estimated in [Hayes] to be phenomenally high, comparable to the profits West Publishing derives from the Westla legal information service, and to those of Microsoft). Thus if Reed Elsevier is to be a victim of the Internet, that is not apparent yet. However, the threat to scholarly journals is visible. Publishers are coping with decreasing circulations and increased publications volume by raising prices, and that is meeting increasing resistance.
Few publishers have accepted the need to reduce their prices. A common scheme for charging for electronic journals is the one used by the American Mathematical Society for its research journals; the electronic version alone costs 90% of what the print version costs, and both versions are available for 115% of the price of the print versions. Publishers are trying to maintain their old mode of operation for the print versions of their journals, with the old cost structure, and in addition produce an electronic version. Hence their total costs are not dropping much, if at all [BoyceD]. No publisher has dared take any drastic steps.
There are possibilities for alleviating the cost pressures on publishers and libraries, at least for a while, which do not force publishers' revenues to drop. Only about one third of the costs of a typical research library is devoted to purchases of books and journals. The rest goes for the staff, building maintenance, and so on [Odl]. If journals were to provide electronic versions not only of their current issues but also of old ones, libraries could dispense with their bound journal collections, and save at least one third of their costs, while maintaining their reference librarian staffs and paying the old prices. However, that would be a drastic step that few scholars, librarians, or publishers seem ready for. It would have to be done on a large scale, and all affected institutions would have to be ready with equipment and training of their staff, and that is hard to arrange.
6. Libraries and digital data
Although academic research libraries are increasing their use of electronics, they have not changed much so far. Changes are more noticeable in corporate libraries, where it is common to find that spending on online information sources is far greater than on books and journals. In the future, we are likely to see research libraries evolve in the same direction. Their role as collectors of books and journals will decrease, and that as gateways to outside information sources will increase substantially. One feature that many librarians are likely to find distasteful is that of providing their clients inferior data. This will be a reversal of their traditional roles of preserving and making as widely available as possible a variety of scholarly materials in the best form possible. If the prediction of extensive bundling and price differentiation in information goods that was made above comes to pass, though, libraries may end up as agents of publishers in limiting the ease of use of data. One can imagine, for example, that some publications would be available only on a few workstations inside the library. This is something that often already holds true for CD-ROM data, but in the future it might be imposed as a totally artificial restriction, designed to enable publishers to charge higher prices for better access.
While librarians do not think of themselves as providers of inferior data, to a large extent that is what they have been since the beginning. Personal possession of a book is usually far superior to borrowing a copy from the library. (The qualifier "usually" is used advisedly here, since in some situations, especially in academic research, libraries can provide a much better service than a personal collection. A friend of mine told me that his father, a famous historian, started selling off his large book collection when he realized that he was often taking an hour to travel by subway to the New York Public Library to look up information in a book that he owned but could not locate.) That is largely what allowed libraries to coexist with bookstores. From the standpoint of a publisher of fiction (and novels are and traditionally have been over 70% of what the general public borrows), libraries help in segmenting the market, charging different prices to different users, and thus maximizing revenues. A novel is typically published in hard cover first, with the aim of extracting high prices from those willing to pay more to read it right away. Once that market is fully exploited, a cheaper paperback edition is made available, to collect revenue from those not willing to pay for the hardbound copy. Libraries coexist with this system, since to use library copies, patrons have to put up with the inconvenience of waiting for their turn on the reservation list, going to the library to pick up the book, having to read it in just a week or two, and so on. Thus libraries serve a different segment of the market than bookstores. (The used book stores serve yet another part of the market.) The existence of a tangible object that is not easy to reproduce makes this system function. What will happen when everything is a stream of bits flowing over high-capacity networks? How does one distinguish between borrowing and obtaining one's own copy? The most likely answer is that there will be artificial restrictions, which will often have to be enforced by librarians.
It is often thought that old materials would be prohibitively expensive to convert to digital form. However, that is not the case. If we consider just mathematics, then the total literature accumulated over the centuries (but with most of it generated in the last 15 years, as is true in most fields) amounts to only around 20 million pages [Odl]. Since projects such as JSTOR scan books at a resolution of 600 dpi at a cost of $0.20 per page, to scan in all the mathematics literature would cost only $4 million. (To typeset all that literature in TeX, say, would cost 10-20 times as much.) In comparison, the total revenue of all publishers in the world from mathematics journals is around $200 million per year. Thus the total cost of placing mathematical literature online is not that great, and similar estimates apply to other fields. However, there would be formidable legal problems in carrying out the conversion operation, since permission would have to be obtained from a variety of copyright holders. (There is even the depressing possibility, mentioned in [Lesk], that large parts of the literature might not get digitized for just this reason until copyrights expire in 50 years.)
7. The future of scholarly journals
The main question facing traditional scholarly journals is whether they can maintain revenues at anything like their present level, or whether they will be replaced (or be forced to transform themselves) into either totally free or inexpensive publications. Publishers are only slowly coming to the realization that their traditional role as the main disseminators of information is rapidly becoming obsolete. Scholars are able to dispense with the publishers' functions in disseminating traditional publications at only a slight increase in the scholars' own work (which, after all, has always been by far the greatest contribution to scholarly publications). To maintain their revenues, publishers will need to switch to providing new value-added services that are becoming possible in the digital world, such as animated multimedia versions of papers.
I am convinced that there will be a flourishing commercial electronic publishing industry. That is one reason I discussed possible pricing schemes for information goods in detail, to show the likely evolutionary paths that will be taken by the whole area, including parts of the scholarly journal publishing field. However, the traditional scholarly journal, publishing traditional articles provided to it free of charge by scholars, will have to change even beyond moving to an electronic format. The economic incentives in scholarly publishing are creating an unstable situation. The main problem is that scholars have more and more opportunities and temptations to bypass traditional publishers. It is possible to have a thriving business distributing freely available information. The Westlaw division of West Publishing has revenues of about $200 million (and exceptionally high profit margins) from distribution of United States court opinions, which are all in the public domain. However, Westlaw controls this business through its ownership of a citation system that is a standard enforced by formal requirements of the court system. (There are some legal and competitive challenges arising to this quasi-official Westlaw monopoly, and it will be interesting to see how West Publishing meets these challenges.) These court requirements, as well as the possibility of malpractice suits if the most accurate legal information sources are not used, all surely help Westlaw flourish. Such features are missing in scholarly publishing. I still feel that review journals, such as Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik, might thrive, since they do provide visible added value that is not easy to derive otherwise. For traditional research journals, it appears that a painful transformation will be required. My prediction in [Odl] was that free or inexpensive journals would take over in 5 to 15 years, and I still feel that is the likely outcome. Moreover, I still maintain that such a change is likely to occur not as a result of competition from free electronic journals, but when academic decision makers realize that traditional journals have become irrelevant.
Free electronic journals have shown that it is possible to have high editorial and refereeing standards in an electronic format, together with various novel features, such as animation and forward referencing, which are possible only in the digital world. However, that is not likely to cause a major shift away from traditional journals any time soon. Where articles are published is controlled by authors, and authors do not have much incentive to move to electronics. Full use of the novel features of electronic publishing, such as multimedia presentation, requires new skills and substantial effort. The one advantage of electronic journals that is cited most often, namely faster publication, appears to be unimportant. Most scholarly articles are read by a few other experts, and authors are able to reach those experts through electronic preprint distribution.
The perverse economic incentives that led to the growth of the present unwieldy and expensive scholarly journal industry are leading to an unstable situation. Authors have never had to consider the costs that their decisions on where to publish caused for the entire community, since those costs were spread so widely. There are examples where large communities shifted from reliance on inexpensive journals that were supported partially through page charges towards much more expensive journals that did not force the authors to pay anything towards publishing their works. Scholars have never been asked to make tradeoffs. Even physicists in areas such as high energy theoretical physics, who almost uniformly use Ginsparg's preprint server [Taubes], continue publishing in traditional print journals. Moreover, in several institutions, when they were asked whether they were willing to give up journals, they have said no. That response is not surprising, though, since they were not offered anything in return for the cancellation of subscriptions. If I am asked whether I would like to be chauffered to and from work, I will surely say yes if there is no visible price to me. I will not say yes, though, if this service will cost me half my salary. For a fair evaluation of how important journals are, scholars should be asked questions of the form, "Would you be willing to give up print journals in your area if in return your department could have an additional three full-time faculty members?" So far, such questions have not been asked. (Moreover, right now the answer would surely be a uniform no, since not enough material is available electronically in most fields. This will change soon, though.)
Publishers claim that their traditional journals provide an important service by validating research results through the refereeing process, and certifying the quality of what they publish. That is true. However, free electronic journals have proved they can provide these services as well, and at much lower cost. Even more important, this validation and certification are "common goods" that no individual institution any longer has a strong incentive to pay for. If Joe Smith, candidate for tenure at some university, claims to have published a paper in a prestigious journal, that university's tenure committee does not need to have access to the journal. They can establish the truth of the claim through any of several reference services. For the validation and certification process to function, it would be enough to have one copy of the journal. In practice, we are approaching that point. Even established journals are losing circulation, and many of the new journals have distressingly low subscription lists. Most authors are not aware of how few libraries receive the journals in which they publish. Even if they were aware, though, it might not make any difference. Scholars can distribute their work in preprint form to all the experts they wish to alert to their work, and now through preprint servers and home pages on the Web they increasingly make their work available to everyone in the world. Hence they do not need to worry about the limited circulation of the journals that they publish in.
Running through all the preceding discussion is the motif of wide dissemination of research results through preprints. If it weren't for that, the future of scholarly journals would look different. However, in the areas that have come to rely on preprints (and their number is increasing, even though they do not cover all fields), there is no turning back. Scholars are increasingly insisting on the right to continue distributing their preprints even after publication of their work in a journal. When a large professional society proposed a revision of its copyright policy that would have explicitly limited this right, it was faced with a revolt by its editors and authors (who, after all, do most of the work, and are not compensated financially for it) and had to back down. The advantages of free electronic distribution are such that an increasing number of scholars are relying primarily on Internet access for keeping up with their fields.
Stevan Harnad has proposed that scholars consciously adapt a wide preprint distribution policy in order to subvert the existing journal system [OkersonO]. Neil Calkin has suggested that a major change in the system will come when university departments set up a uniform system of departmental preprint servers, and designate an administrative assistant to ensure that all the relevant preprints are included (to compensate for individual scholar's inattention to duty). However, even without any formal policies, the subversive influence of preprints has been noticeable for a long time. Library budgets have been increasing rapidly. The frequent complaints about cutbacks have mostly reflected cuts in the number of journal subscriptions. Budgets have gone down only on rare occasions. However, even rapid library budget increases have not been sufficient to keep up with rises in journal costs. The result has been cutbacks in subscriptions. In Issue no. 153 of the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues (dated Jan. 27, 1996) [NSPI], there is a note from Faxon (probably the largest subscription agent, that handles journal orders for libraries) on their price projections for 1997. For North America, they expect average increases of 10.3% in subscription prices to individual journals. These increases come from 2.8% general inflation, 3.0% increase in number of pages published, and a 4.5% decrease in number of subscriptions. How is it possible for the subscriptions to solid scholarly journals to continue dropping by 4.5% per year (which corresponds to halving the number of subscriptions in 16 years)? If the community of scholars working in the area of the "Journal of the game-theoretic aspects of the political economy of Drosophila melanogaster" is growing (as is true for most scholarly areas), and the journal is attracting an increasing number of submissions, how can subscriptions decrease? The simplest explanation is that the journal is becoming irrelevant. Most likely preprints are taking over the role of dissemination of information, although increasing use of email, phone, and fax among scholars, as well as proliferating conferences that frequently bring scholars together are probably contributory factors.
Although library budgets have been increasing, they have been rising at a slower rate than the rest of the academic budgets. This has led to suggestions that if only universities gave libraries "their rightful share" of the total pot, the scholarly publishing crisis would be over. However, a more realistic way of looking at the decreasing share of the academic budget going to libraries is that this is another sign of the decreasing importance of traditional publications. After all, there is never enough money for everything, and libraries have to compete with faculty salaries, the football team, the presidential yacht, laboratory equipment, and many other needs. That the libraries have been losing in this competition for funding is another indication that their value is decreasing. This may be another indication of the general transformation of our educational and research system that the digital age is forcing on us [Denning, Noam].
The precise timing of any drastic changes is hard to predict, but I still feel that, as predicted in [Odl], they are 3 to 15 years in the future. (The lower bound of 5 in [Odl] is now changed to 3 to reflect passage of time.) Different areas are likely to be affected at different rates, depending on their practices. For example, some areas still do not use preprints much, and there transition is likely to be slower. A plausible explanation for why there are many free electronic journals in mathematics and the humanities, and relatively few in information sciences and physics [HarterK], is that scholars in mathematics and the humanities live in an environment of many small journals, frequently run largely by scholar editors, and so do not feel the need for large institutions to support publications.
References:
[ARL] Association of Research Libraries, Directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and academic discussion lists. Available at URL http://arl.cni.org.
[BoyceD] P. B. Boyce and H. Dalterio, Electronic publishing of scientific journals, Physics Today, Jan. 1996, pp. 42-47.
[Denning] P. J. Denning, Undergraduate education in computer science and engineering, Computing Research News, Jan. 1996. (Available at URL http://www.cra.org/CRN/.)
[EMIS] European Mathematical Information Service, URL http://www.emis.de/.
[HarterK] S. P.Harter and H. J. Kim, Electronic journals and scholarly communication: A citation and reference study, to be presented at the ASIS Midyear Meeting, San Diego, CA, May 20-22, 1996. Available at URL http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/PrePrints/harter-asis96midyear.html. Information about the conference available at URL http://pepper.lis.utk.edu/asis.html.
[Hayes] J. R. Hayes, The Internet's first victims?, Forbes, Dec. 18, 1995, pp. 200-201.
[HitchcockCH] S. Hitchcock, L. Carr, and W. Hall, A survey of STM online journals 1990-95: the calm before the storm, http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/survey/survey.html.
[Lesk] M. Lesk, The seven ages of information retrieval, to be published.
[NSPI] Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues, published electronically at Univ. of North Carolina, available at URL http://sunsite.unc.edu/reference/prices/prices.html.
[Noam] E. M. Noam, Electronics and the dim future of the university, Science 270 (Oct. 13, 1995), 247-249.
[Odl] A. M. Odlyzko, Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, Intern. J. Human-Computer Studies (formerly Intern. J. Man-Machine Studies) 42 (1995), 71-122. Also in the electronic J. Univ. Comp. Sci., pilot issue, 1994 ( http://hyperg.iicm.tu-graz.ac.at). Condensed version in the Notices Amer. Math. Soc., 42 (Jan. 1995), pp. 49-53, and reprinted in several places, including [OkersonO, PeekN]. Accessible at URL ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/index.html.Z.
[OkersonO] A. S. Okerson and J. J. O'Donnell, eds., "Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing," Assoc. Res. Lib. 1995.
[PeekN] R. P. Peek and G. B. Newby, eds., "Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier," MIT Press, 1996.
[Quinn] F. Quinn, Roadkill on the electronic highway? The threat to the mathematical literature, Notices Amer. Math. Soc., Jan. 1995.
[Samuelson] P. Samuelson, Technological protection for copyrighted works, to be published.
[Taubes] G. Taubes, two articles, (i) Science journals go wired, and (ii) Electronic preprints point the way to 'author empowerment', Science, vol. 271, no. 5250, Feb. 9, 1996.
[VanH] D. E. Van Houweling, Knowledge services in the digitized world ..., in "Electronic access to information : a new service paradigm : proceedings from a symposium held July 23 through 24, 1993," Palo Alto, California, edited by Win-Shin S. Chiang and Nancy E. Elkington, Research Libraries Group, Mountain View, Calif., 1994.
[Varian] H. R. Varian, Pricing information goods, available at URL http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html. ```
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