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From: Phil Agre
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Subject: 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
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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
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