Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

For several years, Harnad has spoken out about objections to electronic publishing that he sees as ill-founded. Here he takes the opportunity of a contribution to this discussion to review those worrisome issues.

From: harnad Fri Jul 8 21:04:39 1994
To: vpiej-l@vtvm1.bitnet (Pub-EJournals)
Subject: Familiar prima facie worries...

The following questions from Bill Turner at Cornell Library fall in the category of "prima facie" worries that get voiced over and over. One replies to the them, only to hear them resurface somewhere else as vociferously as ever. There ARE some profound questions about electronic publishing, but, alas, these are not they! These are questions based entirely on old papyrocentric thinking and habits. Nothing personal about Bill! Many, many others have asked the exact same questions. I had planned to write an article for Serials Review, laying them to rest once and for all (and still hope to do so, if I ever find the time to for it); and I carry them around (along with 30 or so further prima facie questions) on transparencies, ready to fix their wagon every time I give a talk.

Date: Wed, 06 Jul 94 10:55:33 EDT
From: Bill Turner - Cornell University Library
Status: RO

Steven, I am in agreement with much of what you are saying about
electronic publishing etc., but I think you (and MANY others) are
totally ignoring the hard questions about electronic publishing.

Is there a real archive? Is it guaranteed to always be there?

Bill,

Is there a real paper archive, and is it guaranteed to be always there? If so, why? and who/what underwrites the guarantee? Whatever your reply in the case of paper, the SAME reply (mutatis mutandis) applies to electronic archiving. Paper is an object; tapes are objects; disks are objects. The safest way to protect a flotilla of objects is to make them redundant, distribute them the world over, and have professionals (scholars and librarians for the most part, in the case of scholarly texts) devoted to preserving them for posterity. In the case of electronic archives, this includes making sure that texts get transferred with every technology upgrade.

There is absolutely no problem in principle here. Nothing unique to electronic archiving. And in fact the electronic archive is potentially much more powerful, efficient, accessible, and inexpensive.

How do I know that what I have retrieved from the network is what you
wrote?

How do you know in the case of a paper text? Chicanery is possible there too. Why don't we worry about it? Well, in the case of esoteric paper publication (which is the kind I'm interested in) it's rarely of any interest to anyone to tamper with it, but if it is, it COULD be protected, at least to the level of the encryption of military secrets: Is that secure enough?

If you decide your work contained an error, how do you correct the
multitude of copies out there?

How do you do it in paper? Publish an erratum or a second edition. The Net has the virtue of being able to make prominent pointers and links to other items along a "thread" of scholarship, including errata and new editions.

Again, no problem WHATSOEVER that is peculiar to electronics over paper; the instinct that there somehow is is simply a paper-bred illusion.

If you notice that someone ELSE's work contains errors, how do you do
anything about it?

Need I go on? What do you do in paper? Do the same (much more powerfully and efficiently) in the Virtual Library.

What do you do about malicious mischief?

There ARE some real security problems on the Net. But esoteric publication is far from being at the greatest risk; encrypted, distributed, off-loaded archives, faithfully maintained, are probably more than good enough for scholarship and science except in rare special cases where even more stringent measures are possible.

We have a real "caveat emptor" situation being actively pursued by
people who in some cases have a particular axe to grind (they think
publishers are getting filthy rich and want to stop it), and they are
willing to accept great losses so long as the publishers are hurt
worse.

I know there are some such people, but I am certainly not one of them. I am quite aware that esoteric scholarly publication is not a gold mine, like movies and the tabloids. I'm grateful publishers do it; I would just like to see them adjust to the new, non-trade model that electronic publishing now makes possible.

Would you REALLY entrust any critical information to the Internet right
now? Bill Turner

Please address this to the 20,000 physicists world-wide who are doing just that, in Paul Ginsparg's Archive, to the tune of 35,000 "hits" per day! In the past I had had occasion to call much of Usenet a "global graffiti board for trivial pursuit," but thanks to Paul Ginsparg, plus the editors of some brave new electronic journals, a portion of cyberspace is now being carved out where scholars and scientists really CAN feel secure in entrusting their intellectual wares.

Stevan Harnad
Editor, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, PSYCOLOQUY

Cognitive Science Laboratory
Princeton University
221 Nassau Street
Princeton NJ 08544-2093
harnad@Princeton.EDU
609-921-7771

P. S. My abstract of paper presented at ASIS 1992 SESSION follows:

FULL-TEXT ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO PERIODICALS
Sponsored by the ASIS Special Interest Group on Library Automation and Networking (SIG/LAN) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)

55th ASIS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh Hilton, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 26-29, 1992

Session II. Full-Text Electronic Access to Periodicals: Strategies for Implementation

WHAT SCHOLARS WANT AND NEED FROM ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

Stevan Harnad

It is useful to remind ourselves now and again why scholars and scientists do what they do, rather than going straight into the junk bond market: They presumably want to contribute to mankind's cumulative knowledge. They have to make a living too, of course, but if doing that as comfortably and prosperously as possible were their primary motive they could surely find better ways. Prestige no doubt matters too, but here again there are less rigorous roads one might have taken than that of learned inquiry. So scholars publish not primarily to pad their CVs or to earn royalties on their words, but to inform their peers of their findings, and to be informed by them in turn, in that collaborative, interactive spiral whereby mankind's knowledge increases. My own estimate is that the electronic medium has the potential to extend individual scholars' intellectual life-lines (i.e., the size of their lifelong contribution) by an order of magnitude.

For scholars and scientists, paper is not an end but a means. It has served us well for several millennia, but it would have been surprising indeed if this manmade medium had turned out to be optimal for all time. In reality, paper has always had one notable drawback: its turnaround time. Although it allowed us to encode, preserve and share ideas and findings incomparably more effectively than we could ever have done orally, its tempo was always significantly slower than the oral interactions to which the speed of thought seems to be organically adapted. Electronic journals have now made it possible for scholarly publication to escape this rate-limiting constraint of the paper medium, allowing scholarly communication to become much more rapid, global and interactive than ever before. It is important that we not allow the realization of the new medium's revolutionary potential to be retarded by clinging superstitiously to familiar but incidental features of the paper medium.

What scholars accordingly need is electronic journals that provide: (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive. Ideally, the true costs of providing these services should be subsidized by Universities, Learned Societies, Libraries and the Government, but if they must be passed on to the "scholar-consumer," let us make sure that they are only the real costs, and not further unnecessary ones arising from emulating inessential features of the old medium.

For scholars and scientists the greatest disadvantage of paper publication has always been its turnaround time, which is hopelessly out of phase with the human thought process. Electronic networked publication now makes it possible for the first time in the history of learned inquiry to explore the full interactive potential of the human brain in a medium that provides the discipline, permanence, and quality control of the peer-reviewed written medium along with the speed, scope and interactiveness of a "live" global symposium. PSYCOLOQUY is a refereed electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association and dedicated to "Scholarly Skywriting": "target articles" reporting important new ideas and findings followed closely by multiple peer commentary and authors' responses. It is in its unique capacity for interactive publication that the revolutionary potential of the new medium lies rather than in its capacity to duplicate the features of paper publication in a faster and cheaper form.

Forward to Chapter XI

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