Several scientists contribute. One is a long-time editor of a substantive electronic newsletter for computer scientists and shares his economic perspectives. Another volunteers to promote the Harnad proposal. Another, a creator of the World Wide Web, comments and offers encouragement for the future. Yet another sees a role for the European Community. Striking is the consensus of the proposal's proponents that practical actions can take precedence for the time being over broader considerations.
Date: Sat 2 Jul 94 00:18:20-PDT
From: Ken Laws LAWS@ai.sri.com
I'll second Stevan Harnad's economic estimate, and his general philosophy. I publish a weekly 32KB newsletter. The electronic circulation is irrelevant in terms of cost. I also send out hardcopy, for which I charge postage and an extra $.25 per week for printing and handling. (I have one hardcopy subscriber, but would want to print out a copy for my own use in any case. It takes me about half an hour to do the formatting, as I haven't purchased a good layout program yet.)
Total costs, including advertising and supplies, have been about $2,000 per year + network access costs (free, in my case) + an occasional purchase of computer hardware or software + whatever my time is worth. I've included the cost of news sources (i.e., subscriptions and professional memberships) in that $2,000; obviously one could pay much more -- even millions, for a weekly such as Newsweek. Harnad's proposal concerned esoteric publishing, which usually uses free material. The peer review -- which I omit -- is also free, except for the correspondence and "shepherding" expenses.
If you don't go after a large readership, there's no advertising expense. If you don't edit authors' papers, there's very little editing expense. If you use LISTSERV or MajorDomo, there's no clerical expense. That's why most net services are free.
Unfortunately, the next level of quality requires at least one paid professional. Money must be collected somehow; either sponsors must be courted or customers must be billed. Net commerce isn't well developed yet, so billing and payment are major hassles. Clerical help with the billing can add to the cost, so sponsorship is usually the better option. I've been advocating self-publication for several years now. Stevan has always insisted on the need for peer review, whereas I see it as optional. Peer review certainly adds an exciting dynamic to his e-journals, and may help in satisfying sponsors. Vanity publishing has entirely different benefits. I expect that both will do well. What will not survive is redundant publishing of slightly varying conference papers, journal articles, and collected works with delays of 1-3 years. Publish or perish has pushed academic publishing to the point of collapse, with library budgets no longer able to archive everything that any scientist wants to record for posterity. That function will now fall to FTP publishing as Stevan suggests, or possibly to CD ROM publishing of tech report archives. Hardcopy publication will become more reader-driven (reader pulled?) instead of author/sponsor-driven, and only the highest-quality collections will appear in print. For those, editing and publishing costs will remain high.
-- Ken Laws, Computists' Communique
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 1994 12:23:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Lloyd S. Etheredge" letedge@access.digex.net
Subject: Re: Possible Strategy re shift to electronic publishing
To: Stevan Harnad harnad@Princeton.EDU
On Thu, 16 Jun 1994, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Lloyd, can I have your permission to post the following to vpiej-l,
the list of electronic journals editors and publishers (and perhaps
a couple of other pertinent lists)?
Steve- Please feel free to post. Sorry for the delay - I was away from my desk for a bit. I'll have a more thoughtful response to you soon. Good points - I think we need a strategy. Lloyd
[Ed. Note: Below, Harnad extracts from original Etheredge message, sent to him personally from Etheredge. It had not appeared heretofore in the public discussion.]
le>> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 1994 00:53:24 -0400 (EDT)
le>> From: "Lloyd S. Etheredge" letedge@access.digex.net
le>>
le>> Re pushing over the house of cards we discussed (the 80% of scientific
le>> journals that might be more efficiently published in electronic form): It
le>> might be timely to talk with a range of people in American science, ask
le>> what they believe is needed, and whether a common strategy would help.
le>>
le>> I.e., perhaps UNESCO can help. But this is, first, an American problem -
le>> it's our journals, and our systems of payment, that are critical.
le>>
le>> I can devote shoe leather to this, esp. in the Washington area. Anyone
le>> you think might be useful to consult?
There is no single person or organization "in charge" of the current flotilla of paper journals. One can of course talk to individual authors, publishers, or societies, but the reason there is not much headway to be made there is that they wouldn't really know what to do. At the agency level, the best strategy is to encourage funders to encourage electronic "PREpublication," and to cover the expense in the research grant.
At the individual scholar level, as I said, by far the best strategy is public ftp/http archives for all preprints. This could be supplemented by encouraging learned societies to bundle and mirror their members' archives in a central repository (even just links and pointers to the home archives would do); the idea is to have high-profile global access TO all scientists' and scholars' work FOR all scientists/scholars. Scholars' societies, universities and other learned and scientific organizations can scale up the individual ftp/http archive visibility (already a huge step forward) by providing centralized subject-coded indices, etc. This should have low-end versions (ftp, archie, gopher) and high-end as well (www, mosaic, hytelnet), to include the full range of Internet users.
le>> A quick & practical solution might be to suggest a change in federal
le>> policy. The Clinton Administration could welcome the opportunity to
le>> take a leading role in developing the benefits of the Information Age in
le>> this area - and change the outmoded policies it inherited.
le>>
le>> E.g., What would you think about requiring that all publications based on
le>> research underwritten by public funds should, within one year of any
le>> initial publication in printed form, be made publicly available in (a
le>> standard) electronic form? (The copyright holders will still be entitled
le>> to a reasonable fee for use.)
Good idea, but "requiring" it may take some fight and time, whereas "encouraging" it might go more smoothly. Re-think the copyright issue, though, because it is a red herring: (Esoteric) scholars and scientists (i.e., most of us, most of the time) do not expect, and do not get, fees for their publications. None. Our publishers do (reasonably, because paper costs a lot of money to produce and disseminate). But in the electronic age, 75% or more of the real expense of paper is out of the loop!
So re-think copyright. It is no longer protecting an expensive technological investment in making the scholar's words "public" (that's what "publishing" does, after all). And since there is in reality virtually no "market" for those esoteric words, why not just scrap all thinking in terms of "fees" -- or, if anything, think of the fees as what the author's research grant PAYS in order to reach the limited number of esoteric peer-eyeballs there are in the world for a given scholarly work.
Also, there is a built in conflict of interest in this hybrid print/net idea, one that will either be (understandably) resisted by paper publishers outright, or used as a means of constraining the electronic version to the same pay-per-view economics as paper for a LONG time to come. That means the continuing irrational and counterproductive denial of the freedom of access to esoteric scholarly work that the economics of print have necessitated for centuries.
I prefer my noncoercive (but subversive) solution: Get all scholars to make ALL preprints of their work available publicly, by anonymous ftp/http NOW. The rest (replacing the preprint in due time by its refereed version, including in the archive "reprints" of previously published articles, etc. etc.) will take care of itself as the house of cards falls.
Your hybrid proposal is just extrapolating the Faustian alliance with paper, when what we should be trying to do is to shake free of it at last. The CORE of that freedom, is FREE GLOBAL ACCESS TO scholars' (esoteric) work FOR all scholars, in perpetuum, with the minimal true costs (less, probably much less, than 25% of what they are now) borne by those in whose interests the free access would exist: the scholars themselves (as authors, learned societies, learned institutions, and research-supporting arms of government).
In brief: Paper means substantial expense. Substantial expense means copyright protection. Copyright protection means fees. Fees mean "protection" of the scholars' work from nonpaying eyeballs. THAT is precisely what the scholar does NOT want. Hence the conflict of interest in the Faustian alliance. Solution: Break out of the paper mold entirely, not by brute force, but by the gentle force of the push of scholarly inquiry itself. With the preprint (and eventually the reprint) universally available for free electronically, the rest of the unnecessary edifice will peacefully vanish in the "perestroika" quietly occasioned by the ftp/http subversion...
le>> This might be a happy solution politically. It changes the incentives in a
le>> reasonable way, without imposing a ban. As a first step, it assures that
le>> print publication can continue (& with advertising revenue) & will be
l>> attractive (i.e., people will subscribe if they want the results quickly),
le>> but also assures that everything will be available electronically
le>> (worldwide) after the first year.
Advertising is a red herring too. First, most esoteric journals don't even carry any (or no significant amount). Second, it too is part of the old Faustian bargain: What do ads have to do with my research results? They are things I reluctantly swallow (along with paper access fees restricting my readership) in exchange for reaching my audience AT ALL. Why resurrect these gratuitous barriers in a new medium where they are not needed or wanted?
le>> This first step also breaks open the current mindset & de facto
le>> might get everything available in electronic form almost immediately -
le>> i.e., if a journal or authors are expected to overcome the inertia and
le>> prepare the electronic form anyway, why not just mount the tape now?
le>> They can create a pricing structure for the first year that costs more than a
le>> membership & paper subscription & slowly reduce prices, under pressure
le>> from their members & with the benefit of experience, to see how far they
le>> can go without losing total income. And they may be pleasantly surprised
le>> to find that the elasticities are in their favor - i.e., a much larger, and
le>> growing, global N of new readers whose fees for early on-line accessing of
le>> individual articles sums to more than the revenue they lose.]
I doubt it, because the hybrid solution you are hoping will generate a benign transition has all the incentives for self-perpetuation built into it. FREE UNIVERSAL ACCESS (to esoteric scholarly and scientific work) is the goal. Paper costs money, and is the only justification for charging money. What we need is a solution that gets paper out of the loop entirely. A hybrid structure, with fees blocking both paper and electronic access, can only DELAY the day, rather than hasten it. In fact, it is no doubt paper publishers' dream that such a hybrid solution will hold back the day forever! How are you envisioning the shrinking prices, given the low "hit" rate for the average esoteric article?
The goal is indeed to switch to a system where the remaining true expenses of publication are covered, but that's going to have to be up-front payment (subsidy through author page charges or learned society or institutional consortium support). There is just no continuous line that will get you from THERE (a subscription-based trade model) to HERE (a subsidy-based free model). All the internal forces of the hybrid structure are conspiring against it. Hence the need for a noncoercive, parallel solution (that will subvert the whole house of cards).
I do think that publishers can play a role in this, but then they must explicitly rejoin on the subsidized-model end, rather than hoping to continue on the trade model.
le>> If the new rule goes through, I suspect lots of folks (in addition to
le>> AT&T) will step-forward to offer the global services. To judge from
le>> yesterday's Times, Sprint & its new global (European) partners might be
le>> interested; and the MCI/British Telecom alliance.
le>> Any alternative ways to get this going with changes in federal
le>> policy? (I'll also ask for advice about a wider range of strategies,
le>> including appeals to statesmanship, etc.)
Let's talk and think some more before making policy recommendations...
Stevan
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 12:37:45 EDT
From: "Stevan Harnad"
Here is a reply from Paul Ginsparg, with whom I completely concur, deferring to his greater technical expertise and experience on every point where he corrects my own errors and inaccuracies.
-- Stevan Harnad
P.S. Paul: whenever I give talks about this, I ALWAYS describe your project as the model for it all.
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 00:04:46 -0600
From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353 ginsparg@qfwfq.lanl.gov
To: letedge@access.digex.net
Subject: Re: Possible Strategy re shift to electronic publishing
Cc: harnad@Princeton.EDU, serialst@uvmvm.BITNET, vpiej-l@vtvm1.BITNET
lloyd (le),
stevan h (sh) forwarded to me your message. few quick comments:
le>> Re pushing over the house of cards we discussed (the 80% of scientific
le>> journals that might be more efficiently published in electronic form): It
le>> might be timely to talk with a range of people in American science, ask
le>> what they believe is needed, and whether a common strategy would help.
le>>
le>> I.e., perhaps UNESCO can help. But this is, first, an American problem -
le>> it's our journals, and our systems of payment, that are critical.
sometimes stevan forgets to mention that some such archives have already been on-line for as much as three years, and can serve as a useful model (especially as an existence-proof that they need not necessarily lead to chaos in the short term, as many would predict -- the longer term remains an open question). the physics and related e-print archives, for example, have over 20,000 dedicated users and already over 30,000 accumulated submissions, typically processing over 35,000 transactions per day.
(the submissions are processed, archived, and indexed automatically --and are made available by e-mail, anonymous ftp, and www from the main site and various mirrored sites [full text, including equations and in-line figures]. subscribers are automatically notified of new submissions via e-mail'ed abstracts. for www access, use: http://xxx.lanl.gov/; for e-mail help, send a message e.g. To: hep-th@xxx.lanl.gov Subject: help; for more info see the "blurb" link on the xxx frontpage, or send a message to the above e-mail address with Subject: get blurb. the system is unstaffed and unsupported -- to date i have had little success with certain funding agencies but a decision on an nsf proposal is due sometime before the fall).
these systems have entirely supplanted recognized journals as the primary disseminators of research information in certain fields (with their sole current virtue being instant retransmission -- the next generation of hypertexted submissions and discussion threads, currently undergoing implementation, will further reconfigure the landscape). my own professional society (and sometimes publisher), the American Physical Society, has at last been jolted from complacency and has scheduled a meeting to take place this fall in Santa Fe to start plotting their future role in the electronic realm. their role remains uncertain, but the overwhelming commitment of the community to electronic distribution is a fait accompli.
sh> At the individual scholar level, as I said, by far the best strategy is
sh> public ftp/http archives for all preprints. This could be supplemented by
sh> encouraging learned societies to bundle and mirror their members'
sh> archives in a central repository (even just links and pointers to the
sh> home archives would do); the idea is to have high-profile global access
sh> TO all scientists' and scholars' work FOR all scientists/scholars.
sh> Scholars' societies, universities and other learned and scientific
sh> organizations can scale up the individual ftp/http archive visibility
sh> (already a huge step forward) by providing centralized subject-coded
sh> indices, etc. This should have low-end versions (ftp, archie, gopher)
sh> and high-end as well (www, mosaic, hytelnet), to include the full range
sh> of Internet users.
actually since mosaic is just one of many co-equal www clients, it doesn't make sense to say (www,mosaic,...) [would be like saying (gopher, xgopher, ...)] - also the gopher people might object to being characterized in the low-end (it is after all a stateless protocol like the http used by www, unlike the stateful protocol of ftp, and nothing to do with archie indexing), but no matter they are not long for the world.
as i have commented to stevan, even in my own highly computer literate community (2nd only perhaps to the computer science community) it would still be unrealistic to expect everyone to be in a position to maintain his/her own public server (due to transient nature of students, postdocs, junior faculty active in research; and also given global nature of community -- this is not just an american problem -- where not everyone is entirely caught up). that is why the short-term must include a combination of centralized archives and centralized indices with pointers to distributed local archives (and why i maintain a fully functional lowest common denominator e-mail interface for submission/retrieval so that no one is left behind, while the more fortunate can preferentially use the higher level interfaces).
le>> E.g., What would you think about requiring that all publications based on
le>> research underwritten by public funds should, within one year of any
le>> initial publication in printed form, be made publicly available in (a
le>> standard) electronic form? (The copyright holders will still be entitled
le>> to a reasonable fee for use.)
a fine idea, except i don't believe that authors should sign over their copyrights at all. i intend to retain 100% possession of my ideas in the form i produce them, publishers are welcome to keep their alleged "value-added" (i.e. the superficial appearance they produce, typically with added typos and other errors). starting 10 years ago, we no longer needed publishers to turn our drafts into something that had a polished superficial appearance. starting more recently, we no longer need them for their distribution network -- we have something much better. what we really need now is to extract just their certification and filtering roles to organize the information for more efficient retrieval of quality material. this can be implemented in a large number of creative ways (some discussed by stevan in his earlier "scholarly skywriting" articles, some others will be hammered out with the amer phys society this fall, and perhaps even implemented shortly thereafter [with or without them]).
let me know if i can provide any further info, Paul Ginsparg
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 11:55:53 +0200
From: Tim Berners-Lee timbl@www3.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Possible Strategy re shift to electronic publishing
sh: "Stevan Harnad" harnad@princeton.edu
le: "Lloyd S. Etheredge" letedge@access.digex.net
sh> There is no single person or organization "in charge" of the current
sh> flotilla of paper journals. One can of course talk to individual
sh> authors, publishers, or societies, but the reason there is not much
sh> headway to be made there is that they wouldn't really know what to do.
sh> At the agency level, the best strategy is to encourage funders to
sh> encourage electronic "PREpublication," and to cover the expense in the
sh> research grant.
In my experience of trying to promote a change, those "in charge" are liable to be the least susceptible to persuasion. Change spreads from the grass roots -- to get from one state of society to another you have to make a path each step of which is taken by a different person somewhere, and each step of which is downhill. In the case of high energy physics, for example, scientists resorted to the net because they needed the speed of publication. There was no mandate from above. A way that you could expedite such a move in other disciplines would be for example to set up a free preprint repository which would accept papers in whatever form it is easiest for the author to provide, for example in postscript by email, and make them easily findable by providing good indexing. Put a cheerful front page to the archive: put some graphics in at the top to encourage readers. Let the thing run with a few gigabytes of disk space, and see whether society responds. You will have to jump start it probably with an injection of existing archives of papers, or pointers to them: otherwise, you will never get a critical product of readership and information base.
sh> At the individual scholar level, as I said, by far the best strategy is
sh> public ftp/http archives for all preprints. This could be supplemented by
sh> encouraging learned societies to bundle and mirror their members'
sh> archives in a central repository (even just links and pointers to the
sh> home archives would do);
Yes -- though the societies may see this as being in competition with their own journals. The interests of their members should be pointed out.
sh> the idea is to have high-profile global access TO all scientists' and
sh> scholars' work FOR all scientists/scholars. Scholars' societies,
sh> universities and other learned and scientific organizations can scale up
sh> the individual ftp/http archive visibility (already a huge step forward)
sh> by providing centralized subject-coded indices, etc.
I see this as one excellent role for the academies of science -- to provide indexes of the works of their members, and of their members.
sh> This should have low-end versions (ftp, archie, gopher)
sh> and high-end as well (www, mosaic, hytelnet), to include the full range
sh> of Internet users.
Given lynx, the www client for the vt100, one hardly has to be a "high-end" user to use www. WWW was designed to cover the range. (Terms: archie is an index of ftp sites, and so is not appropriate to this set of retrieval systems. "www" is a line-mode interface to the WWW, and mosaic is one of the graphic user interfaces to WWW. Hytelnet is a database of telnet sites, and so is not appropriate to this set.)
le>> A quick & practical solution might be to suggest a change in federal
le>> policy. The Clinton Administration could welcome the opportunity to
le>> take a leading role in developing the benefits of the Information Age
le>> in this area - and change the outmoded policies it inherited.
le>>
le>> E.g., What would you think about requiring that all publications based
le>> on research underwritten by public funds should, within one year of any
le>> initial publication in printed form, be made publicly available in (a
le>> standard) electronic form?
Possible -- though federal policy change is not always the quickest and easiest solution.
sh> In brief: Paper means substantial expense. Substantial expense means
sh> copyright protection. Copyright protection means fees. Fees mean
sh> "protection" of the scholar's work from nonpaying eyeballs. THAT is
sh> precisely what the scholar does NOT want. Hence the conflict of interest
sh> in the Faustian alliance. Solution: Break out of the paper mold
sh> entirely, not by brute force, but by the gentle force of the push of
sh> scholarly inquiry itself. With the preprint (and eventually the reprint)
sh> universally available for free electronically, the rest of the
sh> unnecessary edifice will peacefully vanish in the "perestroika"
sh > quietly occasioned by the ftp/http subversion...
You might find it is already happening anyway...(But when it has happened, you may want to pay for the filtering done by a good review system, I suspect!)
Tim Berners-Lee
CERN
Geneva, Switzerland
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 13:08:03 EDT
From: "Stevan Harnad" harnad@princeton.edu
Note: I have to point out that behind the desideratum shared by many of us -- that the esoteric scientific and scholarly literature can and should be made available electronically to all for free, and that public ftp/http archives may well hasten the day when they are -- there are some NONdivisive differences of opinion regarding the need for quality control (peer review, editing/copy-editing). Nothing hinges on them for the matter at hand. I just happen to be relatively conservative on that subtopic, and Andrew Odlyzko relatively laissez-faire.
Stevan Harnad
From: david@arch.ping.dk (David Stodolsky)
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 11:13:21 +0200 (MET DST)
sh> I do think that publishers can play a role in this, but then they must
sh> explicitly rejoin on the subsidized-model end, rather than hoping to
sh> continue on the trade model.
If we can locate a European Publisher that will cooperate, then there is a good chance of getting at least of few years of subsidy under the EU's Fourth Framework for R & D. In the Telematics area, there is supposedly going to be an emphasis on applications, as opposed to infrastructure development, which has been the main line so far. Directorate General XIII/E has already funded exploratory actions in multimedia publishing, using Third Framework money for feasibility projects preparing for the Information Engineering program under the new Fourth Framework. Two of the examples of areas suitable for pilot applications listed:
the development of new forms of Sci. & Tech. publishing using networks and exchangeable media
sector specific demo projects from electronic products and services such as electronic newspaper or magazine development
My feeling, however, is that the publishers are a lost cause due to the conflict of interest. I think a better option is a company that benefits from the move to on-line access. If scientists are going to develop their reputations on-line, then security is essential. Maybe one of the smart card producers would cooperate. I am investigating these companies in connection with another project and can bring this up as an option. Network operators also are a possibility. RARE is coordinating some activity, but I have yet to see anything definite.
For further info fax to:
European Commission
DG XIII, Directorate E
JMO C4/024
L-2920 Luxembourg
Fax: (352) 430132847
Contact: R. F. de Bruine
David S. Stodolsky, PhD
Internet: stodolsk@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Peder Lykkes Vej 8, 4. tv.
Internet: david@arch.ping.dk
DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
Voice + Fax: + 45 32 97 66 74