Bernard Naylor is the University Librarian at the University of Southhampton. He initially joined the discussion through a paper coincidentally written at about the moment the "subversive" discussion was beginning. This section begins his various contributions to the subversive proposal.
[Ed. Note: Because a great deal of the discussion from here on includes comments on Bernard Naylor's essay written for a meeting of Euorpean librarians, we reproduce it here. It was published in the LIBER Quarterly, 4 [1994], pp. 283-289. We thank Dr. Heiner Schnelling, of the Universitaetsbibliothek of Giessen, for permission to reprint.]
From: "Bernard Naylor" B.Naylor@soton.ac.uk
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 94 17:30:01 BST
CLEARING THE GROUND
Before entering onto the main substance of this paper, it will be useful to clear the ground on a number of points.
The first thing to remember is that publishing journals is a large international industry. Much of the content of journals is brought to fruition in universities, and universities are prominent buyers of the ultimate product. What goes on in between is an industry. The shares of journal publishing companies and subscription agents are quoted on the Stock Exchange. Journal publishing companies draw up accounts which reveal profits and losses. They raise capital for new ventures. In the final analysis, they know that unless they trade profitably, they will end up in liquidation.
Some academic publishers take a longer term and less commercial view of their operations, but their constraints are getting tighter, too. Some societies have hived off their journals to commercial companies, either to be rid of the administrative burden, or with the object of generating increased income. Sponsoring institutions also take a much less indulgent view about the spending of the institution's money on a journal, for example by the provision of administrative support in the office of a teaching department. Where they might once have done this just for the prestige, now they are more likely to demand financial compensation.
If we are speculating about the future of the journal, we are also anticipating change in the industry. Large international industries do not make radical change tidily, and fortunes can be made and lost in the process. I cannot think of any industry which has successfully restructured itself solely as a result of customers (which is what we librarians are) sitting round tables and talking about their problems. So, while I think that exchanges of views among players in the journals industry are very much needed at the present time, I do not expect miracles of readjustment to flow from them.
The second introductory point concerns the number of players in the journals industry, librarians, publishers, serials agents, document delivery services, writers, editors, users of journals. Some players do more than one thing. Writers of articles are usually readers of journals. Blackwells is an agent and a publisher. CARL is a document delivery service based on libraries. The result of this is some confusion of roles. Obviously, the players do not all have identical interests. A particularly interesting question is: who are journals published for? Is it for librarians who buy them but rarely read them? Is it for library users, who curse if they are cancelled, but have little financial stake in the purchasing process? Is it for writers (usually themselves library users also) who want to see their work in print because of the academic prestige attached -- and even though they may suspect that very few people will ever read it? Journal publishing clearly is an industry but in some respects it is a very strange industry.
My third introductory point concerns the complexity of the journals problem. There are some features, copyright for example, which are worth a whole series of lectures in themselves. Every debate on the future of journals risks foundering on interventions like: "yes, but you have forgotten to mention such a thing." I propose to concentrate mainly on two factors, the economics of the situation and the impact of technology. This is for two reasons. First, because I think they are, in the final analysis, the most important, and secondly, because the other problems are often produced or intensified by these two. For example, the problems of copyright often arise because of activities libraries get up to in respect of journals to which they cannot afford to subscribe or because of the remarkable opportunities opened up by information technology -- opportunities which many journal publishers regard as threats to their ownership of copyright.
ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF THE JOURNALS PROBLEM
There are many ways of looking at the economic aspects of the journal problem. Let me get one of them out of the way to begin with. In all the conflicts about the cost of journals, I have little time for the demonising of any of the parties to the conflict. Some publishers are no doubt wicked profiteers, just as a few (but very few) librarians are cavalier about the rights of copyright owners. On the whole, I think publishers want to make a decent living like most people in an industry, and some of the economic problems of dwindling circulation lists and price increases which continually exceed the rise in the retail price index are problems they would prefer to do without if only they thought they could.
I therefore need to restate the economic problem, and I present it, first, as follows:
"The scholarly community in general and academic libraries in particular cannot at present afford as much scholarly communication of a print-on-paper kind as they would like."
Economists would probably say there is an excess of supply over demand, and it was one of those economists who identified the journals problem in those terms, and asked me in a rather exasperated way: "Then why are prices going up instead of down?"
One answer undoubtedly is that demand for journals is quite a funny concept in economic terms. Normally, we associate demand for a product with the economic power to purchase it. Most managers of academic libraries do not themselves demand journals; the demand comes more from their users who do not have to pick up the bills. This is a potent factor in the way that supply and demand in the journals industry operates. I could therefore try a further restatement of the economic problem in the following terms:
"The scholarly community in general would like more scholarly communication of a print-on-paper kind but academic libraries consider that they cannot afford it from their present resources and have often been unable to achieve the increase in resources necessary to afford it."
If there is an excess of supply over demand in the journals industry, and there seems no prospect of an increase in demand, the obvious alternative is that supply ought to fall. However, whichever way you look at it, supply is tending to increase. We are getting more articles in our existing journals. We are getting more new journals -- though old ones are dying too. All this should be evidence of burgeoning demand; and so it is, but demand from the users of journals rather than their purchasers, the libraries. The normal self-readjusting tension between supply and demand fails to operate.
In effect, we have looked at two possible responses to the mismatch between supply and demand. One is to increase demand -- but libraries cannot seem to get more money. The other is to reduce supply - but it is increasing. A third would be to reduce costs -- but costs too are increasing. So cancelling subscriptions is very understandable, and many economists would see it as tending to remedy the mismatch between supply and demand. Unfortunately, the whole situation is so atypical that the librarians' response has so far shown few signs of putting things right.
JUST IN TIME AND JUST IN CASE
Another noteworthy thing about journals as a product is that you can consume journals in one of two ways. The normal way we consume journals is by subscribing to them. We can also consume them by ordering individual journal articles from document delivery services. This is not unique to journals. Some people do not own cars but can nevertheless avail themselves of motorised transport. They can hire a self-drive car or take a taxi. The car owner has made a "just in case" purchase; he spends because he has a general expectation of his needs. The hired car or taxi user is a "just in time" consumer who spends because of a precise and immediate need.
It is now becoming clear to me that the future of the journal involves a battle over "just in case" and "just in time" in the journals industry. Like the consumer who does not want to afford to own a car and falls back on "just in time" car hire, the librarian who cannot afford to subscribe to a journal "just in case", falls back on "just in time" provision, that is from a document delivery service. We may care to note, in passing that, in a user service environment, "just in time" is usually more accurately described as "just too late." The user normally would like something at the time of asking and the delay while the document is delivered may be acceptable but is usually second best.
The more important thing is this. The "just in time" car user makes a fairly realistic contribution towards the cost of the product, paying the car hire firm or the taxi driver. By contrast, the "just in time" journal user makes a very poor contribution - but the contribution is increasing as document delivery services increasingly collect royalties on behalf of the owners of the journals from which they supply copies. Royalties are not liked by librarians but they do make for a more realistic choice for the consumer between "just in time" and "just in case." They also help to ensure that the "just in time" approach does not irretrievably damage the financial viability of the product on which it is dependent.
As we all know, document delivery services are improving dramatically at the present time, and it looks as though information technology will allow further improvements. I have already referred to document supply as an example of "just too late" provision. With improvements in networking and in the terminals available to end users, and with the advances in such technologies as CD-ROM, it is becoming increasingly possible to take journals in electronic form, either by subscription, or by the purchase of individual articles as required. There is an increasing number of experiments taking place. Some publishers are offering electronic versions of their journals, alongside the traditional product. Some are pursuing new service concepts, in such experiments as ADONIS, TULIP and RED SAGE. Some are launching entirely new journals in the electronic medium only, such as PSYCOLOQUY. The number of those is growing steadily but from a very small base. Some document supply services -- and CARL is the obvious example -- are making increasing use of fax. The overall effect is that the tardiness of document supply looks like a diminishing factor. Libraries and end users feel increasingly confident that document supply services will soon be able to meet their needs quickly enough - at a price.
CONTINGENT FACTORS
This welcome trend contains lots of problematical factors and I ought to enumerate some of them.
There are technical problems. Can the networks cope with the bandwidth? The answer seems to be "yes" as long as we are talking of a few experiments, but "possibly not" if we are thinking of this as a heavily-used technique. Can the end user terminals cope with the bandwidth? The answer is "by no means all of them", and for the time being a terminal adequate to present high resolution illustrations is more expensive than a standard terminal for word-processing and spread sheets. Are the formats for articles satisfactorily standardised? No. Are there outstanding questions about user interfaces? Most certainly. The trouble-free transmission of journal articles of all kinds and in large numbers is still technically some way in the future.
Then there are the financial problems. In principle, one copy of a journal in Boston Spa or Hanover can feed photocopies of articles to every library there is, and the price the user would pay at present is mainly one of delay. With technical advance, one electronic copy of a journal could satisfy the world, and delay would be minimal or nil. So far, the way of paying for such a development has not emerged. Indeed, plenty of people are not sure it needs to be paid for. They believe "the age of the free lunch" has really arrived. I think a way will be found to enable people to pay in advance "just in case" for electronic journals as they do for printed ones. There are examples such as CD-ROM and the BIDS services, launched in recent years in the UK, which can help us to sort this out. I also believe that some system of licensing users will impose the necessary controls to protect revenue.
Questions of copyright are tightly bound up with the financial problems. I can remember the days when photocopies were spewed slowly and wetly from a foul smelling chemical sink -- and nobody attached any importance to copyright, because it was very difficult to contravene to any significant extent. Copyright became a serious issue with the growing ease of photocopying. With the lightning ease of electronic transfer, the serious issue has become a potential nightmare for a publisher interested in protecting copyright, and by implication the revenue stream. So far, we are barely at the stage of defining the issues sufficiently clearly to suggest a blueprint for a possible solution.
An increase in dependence on photocopied articles has made some people question whether the journal or the journal part will survive as a unit of publication. It is suggested that the individual article, identified through an indexing or abstracting service and obtained through a document delivery service, is now the focal point. However, the demand for journals of a traditional kind continues among library users, and I hear a great deal from ordinary library users in defence of browsing, or rather in enthusiastic advocacy of browsing, enough to satisfy me that it has to be taken seriously and allowed for, if possible. To my mind, the forecast that the individual article as publishing unit would rise in triumph, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the dead journal, was more fashionable a year or two ago than it is now.
The last point I want to make in this section of my paper concerns the question of how the great abundance of conventional printed journals will decline and disappear. Our own behaviour and the behaviour our users expect of us suggest that the least popular journals will be replaced first, because those are the ones we cancel and for which we first come to depend on modern methods of document supply. This makes the exciting new technology a crutch for our weakness rather than a banner for our ambitions for the future, a strange role indeed. What does look certain is that secondary source periodicals, such as indexing and abstracting tools, in printed form, are in terminal decline. Otherwise, the broad image of the future shape of events is still surprisingly unclear.
REBIRTH OF THE JOURNAL
In addressing the economic aspects of the journal problem, I have slipped imperceptibly into talking about technology. I now embark on a more formal discussion of technology from one significant aspect. Let us imagine, if we can, that the potential of the network had emerged in a setting where the exchange of knowledge was not already underpinned by a host of printed journals. What do we observe on the network? We can see people informally exchanging information in the most natural way. We can see this process being organised into discussion groups so that people with common interests can have readier access to one another's views.
We can see a controversy starting to emerge as to whether the flow of knowledge should be entirely unmoderated or whether there should be some discipline and some prior assessment of the value of each contribution. We can sense increasing concern about the sheer exuberant volume of communication. How can we be sure we are not missing something significant? How can we avoid being swamped by masses of trivia and irrelevant detail?
We can already notice anxieties about the economic future of this massive information flow. For now, it is all happening for nothing, but persistent rumours about charging for the Internet at the point of use refuse to lie down. We can hear some people saying that a policy of charging for access to information over the Internet would simply be a sensible mechanism for securing the future of this medium of communication. We can hear other voices saying that freedom of information means that access to information should be free and that the chance to implement such a radical proposal is with us now. We can also identify the demand that the system should have a means of clearly fixing each intellectual contribution to the exchange, so that there is no argument about who said something, what they actually said and whether they can establish a claim to be the first to say it.
The interesting thing to me in all this is that I can see history repeating itself. In the early growth of scientific communication, and in the appearance of the first scientific journals, we can see some of these same important considerations asserting themselves, especially the individual's desire to establish the primacy of his or her discovery, and the role of the peer group in establishing the authority of a medium of communication and in assessing the intellectual value of a particular finding or report, before it is promulgated. As the history of the journal has developed, we can see the same considerations about the importance of scientific communication as a social process coming to the surface. There is a kind of special irony in the fact that, as the printed journal is today trying to face up to the difficult challenges of its uncertain financial future, the electronic equivalent is already posing the question: how can we ensure that, as a medium of communication, it can serve its purposes, and, at the same time, pay for itself?
CONCLUSION
I therefore see two convergent developments taking place as a result of the availability of electronic networks. In the first, I can see the possibility that electronic networks will remove most of the delay involved in the "just in time" provision of journal articles. This process has already raised questions about the nature of the journal, why articles are bundled together in the way they are, and whether a new communication technology will provoke radical change. In the second, I can see a new parallel process of knowledge communication growing up; and the present signs are that it is tentatively moving towards operating conventions which strongly echo the conventions of the traditional print-on-paper product.
As for how quickly these changes will take place, I would first say that it is likely to vary from subject to subject. Having said that, I am very mindful of the so-called millennial religious sects. From time to time the end of the world, like the end of the printed journal, is prophesied. So far, it has never come about and so we tend to laugh at further such predictions. Some people say that the world will never end, just as they say the printed journal will always be with us. They could be right but on the whole I don't believe them. Whether I will be around to see them being proved wrong, I wouldn't like to predict.
Bernard Naylor
Southampton
July 1994
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 94 11:01:36 EDT
From: "Stevan Harnad" harnad@princeton.edu
To: gs@reagan.ai.mit.edu (UNESCO List EJ LIB),
serialst@uvmvm.bitnet (Lib Serials list),
vpiej-l@vtvm1.bitnet (Pub-EJournals)
Subject: Paying for the Pipe vs. the Piper in Esoteric Publishing
Below are my annotations to the draft of a paper by Bernard Naylor, Director of the University of Southampton Library and much involved in the future of journal publication in the UK. Further discussion is invited.
[Ed. Note: The full text of the paper appears above.]
Stevan Harnad
From: "Bernard Naylor" B.Naylor@soton.ac.uk
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 94 17:30:01 BSTThe first thing to remember is that publishing journals is a large
international industry. Much of the content of journals is brought to
fruition in universities, and universities are prominent buyers of the
ultimate product. What goes on in between is an industry. The shares of
journal publishing companies and subscription agents are quoted on the
Stock Exchange. Journal publishing companies draw up accounts which
reveal profits and losses. They raise capital for new ventures. In the
final analysis, they know that unless they trade profitably, they will
end up in liquidation.
The possibilities opened up by electronic scholarly publishing allow us to make finer distinctions: There's (1) trade publishing; then there's (2) trade scholarly publishing; then there's (3) "esoteric" (no market) scholarly publishing, which until now has also had to be treated on the trade model, but now this is no longer true. The trade model is the selling of the author's words; both publisher and author expect to make some money from this. In esoteric publishing, where there is virtually no market for the author's words, the trade model has continued to be applied because paper (and its attendant sizeable expenses) offered no alternative. Electronic-only publication (at less than 25% of the cost of paper publication) offers a radical alternative. The author, his learned societies, institutions and grants pay these much lower per-page expenses and the words are then available to all for free. This is also in agreement with the motivational structure of esoteric publication, where the scholar/scientist's main interest is in reaching the eyes and minds of his peers in cumulative, collaborative research, not in making revenue from the sale of his words.
I cannot think of any industry which has successfully
restructured itself solely as a result of customers (which is what we
librarians are) sitting round tables and talking about their problems.
So, while I think that exchanges of views among players in the journals
industry are very much needed at the present time, I do not expect
miracles of readjustment to flow from them.
Libraries may be the paying customers, but the real consumers (and also the producers) of esoteric publications are the scholars themselves. Libraries have been hostages in the Faustian bargain scholars have had to make with paper publishers in order to reach the eyes and minds of their fellow-scholars. Libraries are now much better advised to ally themselves with those scholars, forming consortia to help pay in advance the much reduced per-page costs of electronic publication, with the product then available for free to all, rather than inadvertently prolonging the status quo by merely readjusting the trade model to which publishers will no doubt cling until forced to adopt the advance-subsidy model out of necessity.
A particularly interesting question is: who are journals
published for? Is it for librarians who buy them but rarely read them?
Is it for library users, who curse if they are cancelled, but have
little financial stake in the purchasing process? Is it for writers
(usually themselves library users also) who want to see their work in
print because of the academic prestige attached - and even though they
may suspect that very few people will ever read it? Journal publishing
clearly is an industry but in some respects it is a very strange
industry.
Your last alternative is closest to the truth for esoteric publication. This has been irrelevant in paper-only days, because the true costs simply made it impossible to adapt to the true motivational structure of esoteric publication. Now this is at last possible, and science and scholarship will be much better served once the need for the requisite restructuring is recognized and met.
But, again, issues are confused if one mixes apples and oranges. What is appropriate for ESOTERIC scientific and scholarly writing (and that's a huge chunk of the literature) is not appropriate for trade scientific and scholarly writing, where there really is and always has been money to be made for both author and publisher from the sale of the text, because there really is a large market of readers willing to pay for it.
For example, the problems of copyright often arise because of activities
libraries get up to in respect of journals to which they cannot afford
to subscribe or because of the remarkable opportunities opened up by
information technology - opportunities which many journal publishers
regard as threats to their ownership of copyright.
It is a foregone conclusion that copyright is a very different matter in the trade model -- where it is assigned to the publisher to protect him and the author from "theft of intellectual property" -- as compared to the esoteric model, where subsidies are paid so the property can reach as many interested peers as possible, with no arbitrary and counterproductive price-tag acting as a barrier to access.
Needless to say, if they contributed to up-front subsidy of electronic page charges (for free-for-all acquisitions), libraries would save vastly over anything they could hope for on the trade model -- in paper, because of its true [but now unnecessary] expenses, and in a pay-per-view or similar electronic system where the price-barrier would be artificially re-introduced, needlessly raising prices for all, while at the same time blocking rather than promoting access to the esoteric work, which is what, after all, is the purpose of esoteric publication.
I agree that it's absurd to treat scholarly publishers as villains: They could obviously do much better in tabloids, best-sellers or movies. But they ARE linked to the status quo, just as tobacco producers are, and only necessity will be the mother of invention on their part. I am grateful that they are willing to publish learned work rather than more money-making stuff, but my gratitude tapers off as their interests come into conflict with those of (esoteric) scholars. In libraries they have the kind of "inelastic" demand that produces price spirals and even the kind of situation in which a virus is so "effective" that it causes the extinction of both itself and its host. Electronic-only publication now offers a path out of this cycle; publishers will only adapt to that new path if they are forced to take it. If I were them, I too would probably want to preserve the trade model and the status quo for as long as possible.
Economists would probably say there is an excess of supply over demand,
and it was one of those economists who identified the journals problem
in those terms, and asked me in a rather exasperated way: "Then why are
prices going up instead of down?"
Simple answer: The wrong people are being taken to be the "consumers," by analogy with trade publication: The consumers are authors, their institutions, societies and research grants. What they are consuming is a (quality-controlled) "public address" (PA) system that allows them to influence the minds and work of their intended readership, present and future. When paper was the only option, we had to pretend this was not so, as if the intended readers were the consumers. (They never were the real consumers, of course; libraries and universities, their proxies, subsidized their consumership by paying for paper journals.)
Remedy this topsy-turvy situation, now that the vastly reduced expenses and vastly enhanced reach of electronic publication make this possible, by paying for esoteric publication where it makes sense: Up front. Then prices will indeed go down instead of up, as more and more information is produced.
One answer undoubtedly is that demand for journals is quite a funny
concept in economic terms. Normally, we associate demand for a product
with the economic power to purchase it. Most managers of academic
libraries do not themselves demand journals; the demand comes more from
their users who do not have to pick up the bills. This is a potent
factor in the way that supply and demand in the journals industry
operates. I could therefore try a further restatement of the economic
problem in the following terms:
In other words, scholarly publication is ALREADY subsidized: Electronic publication now makes it possible to recoup the greatly reduced true costs at the logical point -- the (near negligible) price of using the PA system -- instead of the absurd one of a subsidized (and largely nonexistent) esoteric readership.
"The scholarly community in general would like more scholarly
communication of a print-on-paper kind but academic libraries consider
that they cannot afford it from their present resources and have often
been unable to achieve the increase in resources necessary to afford
it."
Like publishers, the scholarly community will only become more imaginative and inventive under the pressure of necessity. Their reading is now subsidized; all they do is lobby libraries for their favorite esoteric lore. If they could have their fill from an electronic source, they would no longer press for the paper and its attendant limits.
We are getting more articles in our existing journals. We are getting more
new journals - though old ones are dying too. All this should be evidence
of burgeoning demand; and so it is, but demand from the users of journals
rather than their purchasers, the libraries. The normal self-readjusting
tension between supply and demand fails to operate.
And, per-(esoteric)-article, those users are precious few! If many (unrelated, uninteresting) articles were not artificially drawn together into issues and volumes, the constituency for any given (esoteric) article would have no clout at all (the average article in SCI is cited by no one and read by not many more). The solution is not to keep thinking of it all the old, trade-based way but to do the requisite perestroika: The real consumers are the "suppliers" -- the authors and their institutions, etc. The real costs of electronic publication are much lower. So the literature could afford to keep growing if these true minimal costs were simply shifted to those in whose interests it is that they should be paid. It is in universities' interests that their scholars should publish. If page-charges were part of their research grants or even their salaries, we could afford to let an unlimited number of flowers bloom, with their individual cultivators paying the minimal expenses of displaying them to all, and all scholars being the beneficiaries (when they swap their esoteric-authors' hats for their esoteric-readers' hats).
In effect, we have looked at two possible responses to the mismatch
between supply and demand. One is to increase demand -- but libraries
cannot seem to get more money. The other is to reduce supply -- but it
is increasing. A third would be to reduce costs -- but costs too are increasing.
Costs may be increasing in paper, but certainly not in electronic-only publication: They are shrinking, and will continue to do so as the software and hardware for the global virtual library continues to be developed.
JUST IN TIME AND JUST IN CASE
Another noteworthy thing about journals as a product is that you can
consume journals in one of two ways. The normal way we consume journals
is by subscribing to them. We can also consume them by ordering
individual journal articles from document delivery services. This is
not unique to journals.
Both models are inappropriate -- whether journal-subscription or pay-per-view, the price-tag interposed between author and reader is completely at odds with the true motivational structure of (esoteric) scholarship and science.
It is now becoming clear to me that the future of the journal involves
a battle over "just in case" and "just in time" in the journals industry.
Catchy as they have become, neither option is optimal, and they do not cover the true options: subsidized, free-for-all electronic publication is a third way (and should perhaps be seen as "just in case" for us all: writers and readers).
By contrast, the "just in time" journal user makes a very poor contribution --
but the contribution is increasing as document delivery services increasingly
collect royalties on behalf of the owners of the journals from which they
supply copies. Royalties are not liked by librarians but they do make for a
more realistic choice for the consumer between "just in time" and "just in
case." They also help to ensure that the "just in time" approach does
not irretrievably damage the financial viability of the product on
which it is dependent.
All old, papyrocentric ways of looking at things, unfortunately.
There is an increasing number of experiments taking place. Some publishers
are offering electronic versions of their journals, alongside the
traditional product. Some are pursuing new service concepts, in such
experiments as ADONIS, TULIP and RED SAGE. Some are launching entirely
new journals in the electronic medium only, such as PSYCOLOQUY. The
number of those is growing steadily but from a very small base. Some
document supply services -- and CARL is the obvious example -- are making
increasing use of fax.
Something very basic is being lost in mixing apples and oranges like this. Some of these "delivery" systems are hybrid and trade-based, just like paper, and charge admission to the reader; others are not, and apply their much lower expenses for quality control, distribution and archiving in the form of an up-front subsidy, with resulting free delivery to all! The implications are radically different -- one a minor improvement on the status quo, the other a radical restructuring of the means of production and access to (esoteric) knowledge.
There are technical problems. Can the networks cope with the bandwidth?
No insoluble problems here, and again necessity will be the mother of invention. Once an irreversible commitment to electronic-only delivery of esoteric scholarship is made, the hardware, user-friendliness, familiarity, channel capacity and standardization will all follow suit. There are no problems of principle here.
Then there are the financial problems. In principle, one copy of a
journal in Boston Spa or Hanover can feed photocopies of articles to
every library there is, and the price the user would pay at present is
mainly one of delay. With technical advance, one electronic copy of a
journal could satisfy the world, and delay would be minimal or nil. So
far, the way of paying for such a development has not emerged. Indeed,
plenty of people are not sure it needs to be paid for. They believe
"the age of the free lunch" has really arrived. I think a way will be
found to enable people to pay in advance "just in case" for electronic
journals as they do for printed ones.
I hope I have provided some support for my view that this may not be the right way to conceptualize the true cost or demand structure, or how to accommodate it optimally.
Copyright became a serious issue with the
growing ease of photocopying. With the lightning ease of electronic
transfer, the serious issue has become a potential nightmare for a
publisher interested in protecting copyright, and by implication the
revenue stream.
But what about the AUTHOR? Is the author worried about all the people photo-copying or electronically retrieving the work, or is the author happy about it? Remember, this is an esoteric author who is not making and never has made or expected REVENUE from all those little-read papers. In the old, Faustian days, the reluctant choice was to accept the Faustian pact (of allowing access to a work only to paid ticket-holders) because that was the only way to reach an audience AT ALL. But now that there is another option, it's time to rethink all of this (as I've argued, for example, in Harnad 1994).
The usual red herring that is introduced in copyright laws plays on the author's fear of plagiarism; but this has NOTHING to do with copyright as used to deter unpaid readers. There are other, better ways to protect one's work from plagiarism (especially in the Virtual Library, with its all powerful search/retrieve/compare tools) than by assigning copyright to a publisher who blocks non-ticket-holders at the door....
I hear a great deal from ordinary library users in defence
of browsing, or rather in enthusiastic advocacy of browsing, enough to
satisfy me that it has to be taken seriously and allowed for, if
possible. To my mind, the forecast that the individual article as
publishing unit would rise in triumph, like a phoenix, from the ashes
of the dead journal, was more fashionable a year or two ago than it is
now.
I'm afraid I completely disagree. Journals will continue to exist (because they are a sensible way of taxonomizing and filtering the literature by subject matter and by the level of quality control [peer review] that their contents have undergone), but the pertinent "item" will of course be the individual article -- and there will of course be no need for date-locked issues in which an arbitrary set of apples and oranges co-appear: The year-number and journal-name will be a sufficient first cut. The rest will be done by sophisticated search/retrieval tools and archiving links and pointers.
The last point I want to make in this section of my paper concerns the
question of how the great abundance of conventional printed journals
will decline and disappear. Our own behaviour and the behaviour our
users expect of us suggest that the least popular journals will be
replaced first, because those are the ones we cancel and for which we
first come to depend on modern methods of document supply. This makes
the exciting new technology a crutch for our weakness rather than a
banner for our ambitions for the future, a strange role indeed. What
does look certain is that secondary source periodicals, such as
indexing and abstracting tools, in printed form, are in terminal
decline. Otherwise, the broad image of the future shape of events is
still surprisingly unclear.
This unfortunately takes the status quo for granted. Electronic-only publication is for ALL of the (esoteric) scholarly/scientific literature, and within that medium the rest can be taken care of by the quality control mechanisms (peer review) and reader preferences.
What do we observe on the network? We
can see people informally exchanging information in the most natural
way. We can see this process being organised into discussion groups so
that people with common interests can have readier access to one
another's views.
So far, the amount of quality control on the Net is negligible. The Net began as a Global Graffiti Board for Trivial Pursuit (as I've had occasion to call it) because it was put together mostly by hackers and students, rather than by scientists and scholars; it is a mistake, though, to assume that this initial anarchy is something intrinsic to the medium. There is plenty of room in the skyways for unconstrained discussion as well as for a rigorously peer-reviewed literature -- plus everything in between. In particular, everything that was possible in paper can be duplicated on the Net (including, if anyone really wants it, lie-in-bed, leafable, virtual magazines and books).
We can see a controversy starting to emerge as to whether the flow of
knowledge should be entirely unmoderated or whether there should be
some discipline and some prior assessment of the value of each
contribution. We can sense increasing concern about the sheer exuberant
volume of communication. How can we be sure we are not missing
something significant? How can we avoid being swamped by masses of
trivia and irrelevant detail?
The medium that generated the information glut is also the best means of managing it. Tools are being developed for navigating the anarchy: dynamic filters, set to search for and include/exclude whatever the user specifies, based on header tags as well as content analysis. You could receive everything on everything, or only the top 3 refereed journals of ornithology.
We can already notice anxieties about the
economic future of this massive information flow. For now, it is all
happening for nothing, but persistent rumours about charging for the
Internet at the point of use refuse to lie down.
We have to distinguish "public access radio" uses of the Internet (the Global Graffiti Board) from its use for esoteric scholarship. Commercial and Dilettante-Chat-Group uses will eventually have to pay their way (one of the biggest current bandwidth-gobblers is porno-graphics), and that will be no great loss to anyone; but esoteric science and scholarship will be but a flea on the tail of that dog, and EVERYONE would be better served if it continued to get a free ride in perpetuum.
CONCLUSION
I therefore see two convergent developments taking place as a result of
the availability of electronic networks. In the first, I can see the
possibility that electronic networks will remove most of the delay
involved in the "just in time" provision of journal articles. This
process has already raised questions about the nature of the journal,
why articles are bundled together in the way they are, and whether a
new communication technology will provoke radical change. In the
second, I can see a new parallel process of knowledge communication
growing up; and the present signs are that it is tentatively moving
towards operating conventions which strongly echo the conventions of
the traditional print-on-paper product.
I think it's simpler than this: The Net has opened up some remarkable possibilities -- for example, interactive ones -- that are not feasible in any other medium, and they will develop and flourish. But in addition to these, it has made it possible to take over completely the scholarly and scientific literature that has so far appeared only in refereed paper journals, and in doing so to emulate all of the paper literature's pertinent properties, whilst prominently improving on only one of them: It will no longer be necessary to apply the entirely inappropriate trade model (with the price tag it interposes between text and reader) to esoteric scholarly and scientific work. Accessibility will be free for all scholars and will be augmented by powerful and sophisticated search and retrieval tools as well as the resource that is entirely unique to the Net: Interactive publication (peer commentary and response on both the refereed and unrefereed literature; Harnad 1992).
Some people say that the world will never
end, just as they say the printed journal will always be with us. They
could be right but on the whole I don't believe them. Whether I will
be around to see them being proved wrong, I wouldn't like to predict.Bernard Naylor
Southampton, July 1994
I make no specific predictions either. But I hope that if the growing number of free peer-reviewed electronic journals is not sufficient to make the paper cards fall, then perhaps something like my subversive proposal -- that all scholars in all disciplines should make their preprints (and then their refereed reprints) available in public ftp/http archives starting NOW -- will help bring them down.
Best wishes, Stevan
From: amo@research.att.com (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 94 16:48 EDT
Subject: comments on Naylor's article
Stevan,
As usual, I largely agree with your comments on the Naylor paper. However, I would like to make a couple of points.
I agree that it's absurd to treat scholarly publishers as villains: They could obviously do much better in tabloids, best-sellers or movies. But they ARE linked to the status quo, just as tobacco producers are, and only necessity will be the mother of invention on their part. I am grateful that they are willing to publish learned work rather than more money-making stuff, but my gratitude tapers off as their interests come into conflict with those of (esoteric) scholars. ...
There is no evidence that publishers would be much better off publishing "tabloids, best-sellers or movies." Scholarly publishing is carried out by the commercial publishers and many nonprofit ones because it is profitable. (The profits of the nonprofit publishers are not called that, but they do exist, and are substantial in many cases.) In fact, I would not be surprised if the profits in scholarly journals were higher than in tabloids, since there is less competition and much greater barriers to entry. (One of the reasons that ethical drug companies are so much more profitable than the typical industrial companies is that government safety regulation requires huge investments and long lead times before a new drug can be marketed. In publishing investments are not huge, but it takes a while for a journal to reach a reasonable level of subscribers.)
Best regards,
Andrew