VPIEJ-L Discussion Archives
July 1994
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 1994 08:41:11 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 94 15:49:33 EDT
Stevan,
Re below, by all means post to a wide list of interested parties. I'd
sincerely love to discover someone/somehow to reduce journal production
costs so that a majority of our expenses were printing/paper-distribution.
Regards, Lorrin
Publications Division, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C.
E-mail: lrg96@acs.org Phone: (202) 872-4541 FAX (202) 872-4389
> From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 19:51:40 EDT
>
> Regarding the phrase "(which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page
> costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers'
> estimates)" from your proposal below, do you mean that printing costs are 75%
> of the total publishing costs? If so, I can assure you this is certainly
> incorrect in scientific/technical publishing. Our experience at the American
> Chemical Society is that printing and paper costs are about 15% of total
> manufacturing costs and the "first copy", or prepress costs are about 85% of
> the total. Could you clarify what you mean? I'd be very interested on what
> basis you make your financial estimates.
>
> Lorrin R. Garson
Dear Lorrin,
Yes, in fact, the data you have often presented were among the ones I
had in mind when I challenged the 75% figure (though many other
publishers have come up with figures similar to yours 70-85%).
I challenge it on two bases, and they are these:
(1) The calculation according to which the "per-page" savings would be
only 25%, leaving 75% still to be paid for is based on how much
electronic processing will save in PAPER publication. The entire
superstructure is set up to hurtle headlong toward print on paper, so
if you recalculate that budget and leave out the print-run and a few
other things, you find you're left with 75% of the original expenses.
Solution? Exorcise everything having to do with going into paper, from
the bottom up. Budget an electronic-ONLY journal, and the per-page cost
will come out much, much lower (if anything, my 25% is an
OVER-estimate).
To put it another way: Your way of doing the figures is rather like
challenging the advantages of automobiles by calculating how much
they would save on horse-feed.
(2) But, if that is not enough, I also speak from experience: I edit
both a paper and an electronic journal. Although the two are not
entirely comparable, and the paper one undeniably still has a much
larger submission rate and annual page count, the true costs of the
electronic one are an order of magnitude lower even making allowances for
this. And this is not because anyone is working for free, or because
the Net is giving the journal a free ride (it gives -- as I delight in
showing audiences in (numerical) figures -- an incomparably bigger free
ride to porno-graphics, flaming, and trivial pursuit, and THAT is much
riper for being put onto a trade model than esoteric scholarly
publication, the flea on the tail of the dog, which I believe we would
all benefit from granting a free ride on the airwaves in perpetuum).
If we charged PSYCOLOQUY's readership (now estimated at 40,000) their
share of the true costs, they would have to pay 25 cents per year (down
from 50% a couple of years ago, as the readership grew and costs
actually shrank; and thanks in part also to centralized subscriber-list
handling at EARN, much of it automatized, as well as to developments
such as gopher and world-wide-web, which are rapidly replacing the
subscriber model by the browser model altogether in electronic publication).
PSYCOLOQUY is subsidized by the APA, which is also a large psychology
paper publisher. I don't know what proportion of the APA's or ACS's
publications are esoteric: I am NOT speaking about publications on
which the author expects to make money from the sale of his text. But
for that no-market portion of the literature, re-do your figures with
the endpoint being a URL file in WWW for all those published articles.
Reckon only the true costs of implementing peer review, processing
manuscripts (electronically), editing, copy-editing, proof-reading,
etc., and then finally electronic archiving and maintenance. I predict
that you will be surprised by the outcome; but this cannot be reckoned
by striking a few items from the ledger based on how you do things
presently.
Best wishes, Stevan
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad
Editor, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, PSYCOLOQUY
Cognitive Science Laboratory
Princeton University
221 Nassau Street
Princeton NJ 08544-2093
> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 1994 16:28:49 +0100
> From: "Paul F. Burton"
> Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
>
> A note to thank you for the notice of your "subversive proposal", but why
> be subversive about it? I've suggested at two conferences this year that
> universities should take back the electronic publication of work done by
> their staff (most of it research carried out with public funds), though I
> have not been as direct as your proposal :-). My personal view is that
> commercial publishers are running scared of electronic publishing, which is
> why they seem to be involved in so many projects.
>
> It seems to me that this is an idea whose time has just arrived. Do you
> think that the Follett Report proposals could include a feasibility study
> of this? I'd be interested in discussing the idea further with you, if you
> have time.
>
> BTW, I seem to have two addresses for you (Southampton and Princeton) so
> I'm sending this to both, as I'd value your comments.
Dear Paul,
It is indeed a subversive proposal, and here's why: Many of us already
share the DESIRE for electronic publication in place of paper; the
question is, How to get there from here? Life is short. The subversion
is in not trying to do it directly, by taking on the all-powerful paper
flotilla head-on. Forget about electronic publishing. Leave the
"publishing" to them. Simply archive your PREprints (on which you have
not ceded copyright to anyone) in a public ftp archive. Let EVERYONE
(or a critical mass) do that. And then nature will take its course.
(Everyone will, quite naturally, swap the reprint for the preprint at
the moment of acceptance for publication, and before paper publishers
can mobilize to do anything about it, the battle will be lost, and they
will be faced with an ultimatum: either re-tool NOW, so that you
recover your real costs and a fair return by some means other than
interposing a price-tag between [esoteric, no-market] papers and their
intended readership, or others will step in and do it instead of you.)
This IS subversive. Direct appeals (whether to authors or to
publishers) to "publish electronically" are not subversive; they have
simply proven hopelessly slow. And at this rate (esoteric) paper
publishers will be able to successfully prolong the status quo for well
into the forseeable future -- to the eternal disadvantage of learned
inquiry itself, which is the one that has been suffering most from this
absurd Faustian bargain for the centuries that paper was the esoteric
author's only existing expedient for PUBLICation at all.
Paper publishers, by the way, are, quite understandably, looking for
much less radical solutions. These compromises are mostly in the
category of "hybrid" publication (paper and electronic), and they share
the fatal flaw of (esoteric -- remember, I am speaking only of
esoteric, non-trade, no-market) paper publication: requiring a price for
admission to a show that has virtually no audience, yet is essential
to us all!
I have no animus against paper publishers. It's natural for them to do
whatever they can to preserve the status quo, or something close to
it. But necessity is the mother of invention, and my subversive
proposal would awaken their creative survival skills. And if they wish
to survive (in esoteric publication -- I cannot repeat this often
enough: what I am proposing is NOT applicable to literature that
actually has a market, one in which the author really has hopes of
selling his words, and a market is interested in buying them, for there
there is no Faustian pact; it is in the interests of BOTH parties,
author and publisher, to charge admission at the door -- if, as I say,
publishers wish to survive in ESOTERIC publication, they will have to
change from a trade to a subsidy model for recovering the substantially
lower true costs of electronic-ONLY publication).
My claim that the true per-page cost of electronic publication will be
25% of current per-page paper costs rather than the 75% that has been quoted
over and over, has been challenged (by Lorrin Garson of the American
Chemical Society) and I have attempted to support my estimate above.
We can discuss this any time (we ARE doing so right now). I'm at
Princeton till end of August, then at Southampton. Both email addresses
will continue to reach me.
Stevan Harnad
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 1994 09:19:28 EDT
Reply-To: Guedon Jean-Claude
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Guedon Jean-Claude
Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
In-Reply-To: <9407010951.AA07685@clarity.Princeton.EDU> from "Stevan Harnad"
at Jul 1, 94 05:51:45 am
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> (1) The calculation according to which the "per-page" savings would be
> only 25%, leaving 75% still to be paid for is based on how much
> electronic processing will save in PAPER publication. The entire
> superstructure is set up to hurtle headlong toward print on paper, so
> if you recalculate that budget and leave out the print-run and a few
> other things, you find you're left with 75% of the original expenses.
> Solution? Exorcise everything having to do with going into paper, from
> the bottom up. Budget an electronic-ONLY journal, and the per-page cost
> will come out much, much lower (if anything, my 25% is an
> OVER-estimate).
While I fully agree with Stevan Harnad's intention, I must differ a little
on the question of how to get there.
Stevan is quite right in saying that the entire superstructure
is set up to hurtle headlong toward print on paper. He suggests
we should 'exorcise" everything having to do with going into paper.
In inciting us to do this thought experiment, Stevan achieves an
important result which is to give us a way to free ourselves from
frames of reference that have been present for so long that they
have become completely naturalized. To see beyond those and to
think "autrement", in a different manner is truly the fundamental
stake.
This said, this is not the only stake. Another problem is to find the
way to reach the vision through the contingent, material, historical,
social, concrete (the choice of the right adjective is anyone's choice)
situation in which we are located now.
Right now, the research system works in an extremely complex manner where
pecking orders, legitimacy, memory building through proper archiving
and bibliographic efforts and even communication :-) takes place.
This is the given and we must start from there while, simultaneously
conjuring up the right vision for the future. In short we must simultaneously
have the right vision of the present and the right vision of the future to
have a chance to chart the right course between now and the future.
The word "right" occurs three times in this sentence and it points to
the fundamental difficulty of the task. In fact it is daunting, but
it should not discourage us.
Personally, my answer to the first right is: look at the best literature on
the history and sociology of research to see how it has been built and
how it works. here the fundamental references are the works from the
Merton school, including Diana Crane's study of invisible colleges and
its quantified extensions through Derek Price's works and the ISI
people (Henry Small's work on clusters is important here, for example).
More recently, social constructivists, ethnomethodologists and other
approaches (such as Bourdieu's workk) have enriched our vision of the
present and allow us to understand that the research system is an
immensely complex juggernaut that will not be modified easily.
As for the second "right", I believe this is where Stevan's ability to
articulate a future for academic publishing of research comes into
its own. He has a great ability to see beyond our normal horizons
and we should heed his voice as he recounts what he has seen. But then
comes the third, most important question: how to get there?
Good old Hegel has taugh us that the new could come out of the old
only if it incorporated enough of the old itself to allow its very
emergence. In other words, moving to the future will require incorporating
some of th eold, and in the case of e-publishing, this means incorporating
some role for paper.
I know that by saying this, I will provoke my impatient friends who
would like to move on directly to the future. But let me remind them
that human beings hopefully will remain part of the future equation,
for, if this is not the case, we will end up in utopia, not in reality.
Utopia has its functions, but they have to be delineated carefully
whe it comes to implementing policies or strategies.
Human beings will have to read for a long time and the act of reading
is not uniform. One of the pitfalls of print is precisely that it has
taught us to treat all information as if it was read in a uniform manner
by providing us with a "maximalist" solution. Definition of print on paper
is generally excellent so that information can be studied, mulled over,
commented upon and so on. However, we do not always want to engage into
reading in this fashion. Browsing, getting a feel for, looking for
specific tidbits of information are some of the many ways in which
we may wish to engage ourselves with regard to information.
With the advent of digitized information and its default materialization
as screen display, we have become aware that the default presentation
was not always the best for all we wanted to do, particularly studying.
As a result, we transfer the digitized information to paper to do this.
On the other hand, to search for information, for easy quoting, and a for
large number of tasks, we keep the infotion in its digital form and
we materialize it in an ephemereal, non-material fashion (if materializing
in a non-material manner makes any sense at all :-). But one basic fact
remains: for the moment, the research system cannot avoid using paper
on some occasions and denying this deprives electronic publishing of
a very basic foundation that will allow it to take off in a fruitful
manner.
As a result, and to go back to the initial question, it is probably better
to calculate the cost as indicated above by Lorrin Garson. In effect, let
us take the worst possible case and see what we can do with it.
The question I would like to raise with regard to academic publishing is the
following. Let us look at the macro picture, independently of countries
and the like. let us look at the whole world system of research publication
and let us define two categories of financing to see how thay fit.
On the one hand, let us call "public money" all sources of financing that
come out of governmental, institutional sources, including foundations
and even private donations. Let us call "private money", money coming out
of the pocket of individuals who actually buy learned journals. I do mean
individuals exclusively.
In the production of learned journals, even without calculating of producing
the research results themselves, public money is always involved, either
implicitly or explicitly. Journals receive support from a variety of sources,
be they those of a university, a department, a faculty, a professional
association, a governmental agency, a foundation, a gift converted into
endowment, etc. Faculty members that take care of journals may receive
help in kind (secretarial, telephone use, whatever) and my have their teaching
load reduced (thus forcing the hiring of another professor or teaching
assistant). Etc. etc... All this is well known and it would be interesting
to have statistical figures about this situation.
But public money is also involved at the other end of the cycle. Libraries
that buy journals, do it with institutional funds that eith come from
the private revenues of a private university, for example, or the grants
givent by a government to a public university (supplemented by the tuition
fees of students).
What would be interesting to look at is the the part of this hidden public
money in the revenues of learned journals. This becomes all the more
interesting that libraries generally pay a much higher subscription rate
than individuals, so that, even though they may a minority in the number
of subscribers, they may still represent an important fraction of the
revenues for a learned journal. If journal editors were kind enough
to supply me with some figures in this regard, i would be delighted to
summarize the results for the net.
Now, going back to the economics of printed journals: what has to be
taken into consideration is everything beyond copy editing, including
postage to mail the issues out, of course (this is an important source
of expense for journals, and it shows in the fact that subscription
rates vary with country of destination).
If the cost of everything beyond copy editing is greater than the revenues
from individuals, this means that moving to electronic publishing would
allow putting all the published results of the research system at the
disposal of the whole world FREELY.
Why don't we do it?
For a number of reasons that are the very points on which we must
work to map out a viable strategy aiming at changing the situation.
1. The treatment of learned journals as commodities is deeply embedded
within institutions and mentalities to the point that granting agencies
use sale figures as legitimate criteria to evaluate whether they support
a given journal or not.
2. The economic analysis I have provided, based as it is on a concept
of public money that is not usually present in accounting practices,
makes sense only if producers of journals and archivers of journals
work hand in hand. In other words, this economic analysis makes sense
if and only if publishers (whatever their nstitutional nature) and
librarians work hand in hand, which is not the case at present.
Yet ARL and AAUP do have a common meeting each year, thus showing
that they have overlapping concerns. The advent of digitized information
will hasten this convergence, as it does in other quarters of activity.
3. Journal editors and publishers are often loath to relinquish detailed,
standardized budgetary figures as these might lead to uncomfortable
comparisons having to do with the local efficiency of a given operation.
However, granting agencies do have figures on large enough a scale
to provide for some statistical support or rebuttal of what is advanced here.
So I call upon them to do this work which, incidentally, can be done
without releasing particular names of journals.
This analysis, if correct, would show that e-publishing may well be already
viable, even with the worst-case scenario of savings limited to 25% of
production and distribution costs. Even finding that this argument is
not correct would be interesting in itself, even though it would force
me to go back to the drawing board. :-) But such is life...
Do send the figures you know or the bibliographic references that would
provide interesting figures in this regard and I will summarize and
synthesize for the whole list.
> To put it another way: Your way of doing the figures is rather like
> challenging the advantages of automobiles by calculating how much
> they would save on horse-feed.
The analogy is amusing, but not quite accurate as, I have pointed out
above, we cannot yet dispense with paper. Electornic publishing is,
in part, delegating printing (where needed) to the reader.
>
> (2) But, if that is not enough, I also speak from experience: I edit
> both a paper and an electronic journal. Although the two are not
> entirely comparable, and the paper one undeniably still has a much
> larger submission rate and annual page count, the true costs of the
> electronic one are an order of magnitude lower even making allowances for
> this. And this is not because anyone is working for free, or because
> the Net is giving the journal a free ride (it gives -- as I delight in
> showing audiences in (numerical) figures -- an incomparably bigger free
> ride to porno-graphics, flaming, and trivial pursuit, and THAT is much
> riper for being put onto a trade model than esoteric scholarly
> publication, the flea on the tail of the dog, which I believe we would
> all benefit from granting a free ride on the airwaves in perpetuum).
>
Stevan raises another issue here, one that has to do with the future
economic structure of the net. The Minitel model may be useful here.
Let porn circulate at high cost through services that will bill their
users accordingly. Let the research results that are published circulate
freely. This is important for another reason: for the first time in the
history of humanity, poor countries would have as good an access to
academic publications as rich countries and they could also promote
their own work on a wider scale, thus helping make their own publishing
centers climb up the pecking order scale in relationship with the
intrinsic intellectual value of the authors they print, rather than
according to their economic clout. This is after all part of the secret of the
prestigious journals of the large private publishing houses in Holland and
elsewhere. Have a good marketing arm, buy up a prestigious editorial
board in one way or another, show yourself as being extremely selective
in your authors and you can't miss. Except that, nowadays, libraries
know how much they pay for subscriptions to those journals...
> PSYCOLOQUY is subsidized by the APA, which is also a large psychology
> paper publisher. I don't know what proportion of the APA's or ACS's
> publications are esoteric: I am NOT speaking about publications on
> which the author expects to make money from the sale of his text. But
> for that no-market portion of the literature, re-do your figures with
> the endpoint being a URL file in WWW for all those published articles.
> Reckon only the true costs of implementing peer review, processing
> manuscripts (electronically), editing, copy-editing, proof-reading,
> etc., and then finally electronic archiving and maintenance. I predict
> that you will be surprised by the outcome; but this cannot be reckoned
> by striking a few items from the ledger based on how you do things
> presently.
This is something where we also need hard figures. Any volunteer?
Stevan's question is crucial.
>
> > From: "Paul F. Burton"
> > Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
> >
> > A note to thank you for the notice of your "subversive proposal", but why
> > be subversive about it? I've suggested at two conferences this year that
> > universities should take back the electronic publication of work done by
> > their staff (most of it research carried out with public funds), though I
> > have not been as direct as your proposal :-). My personal view is that
> > commercial publishers are running scared of electronic publishing, which is
> > why they seem to be involved in so many projects.
I agree with Paul Burton's basic proposal that research centers (including
universities, of course) should take back the elctronic publication
of work done (but not only by their staff, as this does not enhance
legitimacy, quite the contrary). In fact, this is where libraries of
the future have work to do. They could say: before we archive research results,
we will have them peer-reviewed. Archiving, of course, means placing a pointer
to a file somewhere. The library does not have to store the file locally,
even though it may choose to do so for reasons having to do with bandwidth.
Placing a legitimized (and legitimizing) pointer to a file and having it
retrievable through a variety of search engines (such as a library-supervised
WAIS system) is tantamount to placing an official seal of approval of some
piece of research and this is what being published has also meant for quite
some time now. I am with you, Paul, but extend the modal a little bit.
> >
> > It seems to me that this is an idea whose time has just arrived. Do you
> > think that the Follett Report proposals could include a feasibility study
> > of this? I'd be interested in discussing the idea further with you, if you
> > have time.
What are the Follett Report proposals? Please clue me in on that one.
> It is indeed a subversive proposal, and here's why: Many of us already
> share the DESIRE for electronic publication in place of paper; the
> question is, How to get there from here? Life is short. The subversion
> is in not trying to do it directly, by taking on the all-powerful paper
> flotilla head-on. Forget about electronic publishing. Leave the
> "publishing" to them. Simply archive your PREprints (on which you have
> not ceded copyright to anyone) in a public ftp archive. Let EVERYONE
> (or a critical mass) do that. And then nature will take its course.
This is where I disagree somewhat. Preprints already circulate a lot
among the people that count. In other words, Stevan Harnad, to take you
as an example, sends preprints to all the colleagues that count.
Putting the same preprint in some ftp site would not help reach that
many more people, first because you know your own invisible college
pretty well, second, because archie is not sufficient to retrieve these
publications efficiently. Unless someone sets up a universal preprint system
with full WAIS capability or soemthing equivalent, these pre-prints
will remain scattered as bits of dust and will never coalesce to create
a viable informational mass. But I am quite willing to let myself convince
on that one.
> (Everyone will, quite naturally, swap the reprint for the preprint at
> the moment of acceptance for publication, and before paper publishers
> can mobilize to do anything about it, the battle will be lost, and they
> will be faced with an ultimatum: either re-tool NOW, so that you
> recover your real costs and a fair return by some means other than
> interposing a price-tag between [esoteric, no-market] papers and their
> intended readership, or others will step in and do it instead of you.)
If you are right, the re-tooling option is not even viable unless paper
publishers find a way to add value to the preprints that has not already
been added by already organized search engines.
>
> This IS subversive. Direct appeals (whether to authors or to
> publishers) to "publish electronically" are not subversive; they have
> simply proven hopelessly slow. And at this rate (esoteric) paper
> publishers will be able to successfully prolong the status quo for well
> into the forseeable future -- to the eternal disadvantage of learned
> inquiry itself, which is the one that has been suffering most from this
> absurd Faustian bargain for the centuries that paper was the esoteric
> author's only existing expedient for PUBLICation at all.
I am not as pessimistic as you on that score. Things are moving slowly
at present, to be sure, but in a kind of cloud gathering mode that will
soon unleash a real thunderstorm. Some threshold effect is at work here
and there are ways to make the threshold come faster than you seem to
think. Our best allies there are academics from the Third World.
>
> Paper publishers, by the way, are, quite understandably, looking for
> much less radical solutions. These compromises are mostly in the
> category of "hybrid" publication (paper and electronic), and they share
> the fatal flaw of (esoteric -- remember, I am speaking only of
> esoteric, non-trade, no-market) paper publication: requiring a price for
> admission to a show that has virtually no audience, yet is essential
> to us all!
You are right on that score
>
> I have no animus against paper publishers. It's natural for them to do
> whatever they can to preserve the status quo, or something close to
> it. But necessity is the mother of invention, and my subversive
> proposal would awaken their creative survival skills. And if they wish
> to survive (in esoteric publication -- I cannot repeat this often
> enough: what I am proposing is NOT applicable to literature that
> actually has a market, one in which the author really has hopes of
> selling his words, and a market is interested in buying them, for there
> there is no Faustian pact; it is in the interests of BOTH parties,
> author and publisher, to charge admission at the door -- if, as I say,
> publishers wish to survive in ESOTERIC publication, they will have to
> change from a trade to a subsidy model for recovering the substantially
> lower true costs of electronic-ONLY publication).
Correct again.
Best,
Jean-Claude Guedon
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jean-Claude Guedon Tel. 514-343-6208
Professeur titulaire Fax: 514-343-2211
Departement de litterature comparee Surfaces
Universite de Montreal Tel. 514-343-5683
C.P. 6128, Succursale "A" Fax. 514-343-5684
Montreal, Qc H3C 3J7 ftp ftp.umontreal.ca
Canada guedon@ere.umontreal.ca
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 1994 09:20:42 EDT
Reply-To: Ken Laws
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Ken Laws
Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
In-Reply-To: <9407010951.AA07685@clarity.Princeton.EDU>
I'll second Stevan Harnad's economic estimate, and his
general philosophy. I publish a weekly 32KB newsletter. The
electronic circulation is irrelevant in terms of cost. I also
send out hardcopy, for which I charge postage and an extra $.25
per week for printing and handling. (I have _one_ hardcopy
subscriber, but would want to print out a copy for my own use
in any case. It takes me about half an hour to do the formatting,
as I haven't purchased a good layout program yet.)
Total costs, including advertising and supplies, have been
about $2,000 per year + network access costs (free, in my case)
+ an occasional purchase of computer hardware or software
+ whatever my time is worth. I've included the cost of
news sources (i.e., subscriptions and professional memberships)
in that $2,000; obviously one could pay much more -- even
millions, for a weekly such as Newsweek. Harnad's proposal
concerned esoteric publishing, which usually uses free material.
The peer review -- which I omit -- is also free, except for the
correspondence and "shepherding" expenses.
If you don't go after a large readership, there's no advertising
expense. If you don't edit authors' papers, there's very little
editing expense. If you use LISTSERV or MajorDomo, there's no
clerical expense. That's why most net services are free.
Unfortunately, the next level of quality requires at least
one paid professional. Money must be collected somehow, so either
sponsors must be courted or customers must be billed. Net commerce
isn't well developed yet, so billing and payment are major hassles.
Clerical help with the billing can add to the cost, so sponsorship
is usually the better option.
I've been advocating self-publication for several years now.
Stevan has always insisted on the need for peer review, whereas
I see it as optional. Peer review certainly adds an exciting
dynamic to his e-journals, and may help in satisfying sponsors.
Vanity publishing has entirely different benefits. I expect
that both will do well. What will not survive is redundant
publishing of slightly varying conference papers, journal articles,
and collected works with delays of 1-3 years. Publish or perish
has pushed academic publishing to the point of collapse, with
library budgets no longer able to archive everything that any
scientist wants to record for posterity. That function will now
fall to FTP publishing as Stevan suggests, or possibly to
CD ROM publishing of tech report archives. Hardcopy publication
will become more reader-driven (reader pulled?) instead of
author/sponsor-driven, and only the highest-quality collections
will appear in print. For those, editing and publishing costs
will remain high.
-- Ken Laws
Computists' Communique
Dr. Kenneth I. Laws; (415) 493-7390; laws@ai.sri.com.
Ask about my weekly AI/IS/CS online news service.
-------
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 1994 09:23:42 EDT
Reply-To: timbl@www0.cern.ch
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Tim Berners-Lee
Subject: Re: Further subversive matters
sh: "Stevan Harnad"
lse: "Lloyd S. Etheredge"
Subject: Re: Possible Strategy re shift to electronic publishing
To: Stevan Harnad
sh> There is no single person or organization "in charge" of the current
sh> flotilla of paper journals. One can of course talk to individual
sh> authors, publishers, or societies, but the reason there is not much
sh> headway to be made there is that they wouldn't really know what to do.
sh> At the agency level, the best strategy is to encourage funders to
sh> encourage electronic "PREpublication," and to cover the expense in the
sh> research grant.
In my experience of trying to promote a change, those "in charge"
are liable to be the least susceptable to persuasion. Change spreads
from the grass roots -- to get from one state of society to
another you have to make a path each step of which is taken by a
different person somewhere, and each step of which is downhill.
In the case of high energy physics, for example, scientists resorted
to the net because they needed the speed of publication. There was no mandate
from above. A way that you could expedite such a move in
other disciplines would be for example to set up a free preprint repository
which would accept papers in whatever form it is easiest for the author
to provide, for example in postscript by email, and make them
easisly findable by providing good indexing. Put a cheerful front page
to the archive: put some graphics in at the top to encourage readers.
Let the thing run with a few gigabytes of disk space, and see whether
society responds. You will have to jump start it probably with an
injection of existing archives of papers, or pointers to them:
otherwise, you will never get a critical product of readership and
information base.
sh> At the individual scholar level, as I said, by far the best strategy is
sh> public ftp/http archives for all preprints. This could be supplemented by
sh> encouraging learned societies to bundle and mirror their members'
sh> archives in a central repository (even just links and pointers to the
sh> home archives would do);
Yes -- though of course the societies may see this as being in
competition to their own journals. The interests of their members
should be pointed out.
sh> the idea is to have high-profile global access
sh> TO all scientists' and scholars' work FOR all scientists/scholars.
sh> Scholars' societies, universities and other learned and scientific
sh> organizations can scale up the individual ftp/http archive visibility
sh> (already a huge step forward) by providing centralized subject-coded
sh> indices, etc.
I see this as one excelent role for the academies of science -- to
provide indexes of the works of their members, and of their memebers.
sh> This should have low-end versions (ftp, archie, gopher)
sh> and high-end as well (www, mosaic, hytelnet), to include the full range
sh> of Internet users.
Given lynx, the www client for the vt100, one hardly has
to be a "high-end" user to use www. WWW was designed to cover the range.
(Terms: archie is an indx of ftp sites, and so is not appropriate
to this set of retrieval systems. "www" is a line-mode interface
to the WWW, and mosaic is one of the graphic user interfaces to WWW.
Hytelnet is a database of telnet sites, and so is not appropriate to
this set.)
>lse> A quick & practical solution might be to suggest a change in federal
>lse> policy. The Clinton Administration could welcome the opportunity to
take a
>lse> leading role in developing the benefits of the Information Age in this
>lse> area - and change the outmoded policies it inherited.
>lse>
>lse> E.g., What would you think about requiring that all publications based
on
>lse> research underwritten by public funds should, within one year of any
>lse> initial publication in printed form, be made publicly available in (a
>lse> standard) electronic form?
Possible -- though federal policy change is not alwaysthe quickest and
easiest solution.
...
sh> In brief: Paper means substantial expense. Substantial expense means
sh> copyright protection. Copyright protection means fees. Fees mean
sh> "protection" of the scholars work from nonpaying eyeballs. THAT is
sh> precisely what the scholar does NOT want. Hence the conflict of interest
sh> in the Faustian alliance. Solution: Break out of the paper mold
sh> entirely, not by brute force, but by the gentle force of the push of
sh> scholarly inquiry itself. With the preprint (and eventually the reprint)
sh> universally available for free electronically, the rest of the
sh> unnecessary edifice will peacefully vanish in the "perestroika"
sh> quietly occasioned by the ftp/http subversion...
You might find it is already happening anyway...
(But when it has happened, you may want to pay for the filtering
done by a good review system, I suspect!)
Tim Berners-Lee
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:33:36 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Re: A Subversive Proposal
Note: I have to point out that behind the desideratum shared by many of
us -- that the esoteric scientific and scholarly literature can and
should be made available electronically to all for free, and that public
ftp/http archives may well hasten the day when they are -- there are
some NONdivisive differences of opinion regarding the need for quality
control (peer review, editing/copy-editing). Nothing hinges on them for
the matter at hand. I just happen to be relatively conservative on that
subtopic, and Andrew Odlyzko relatively laissez-faire. -- Stevan Harnad
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: amo@research.att.com
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 08:02 EDT
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
Thank you very much for sending your proposal. It's been my contention
for a long time (for example, in the original draft of the "Tragic loss
..." essay) that widespread distribution of preprints through
electronic media, either via preprint servers such as Ginsparg's, or
through ftp directories, would subvert paper journals. One thing that
is worth emphasizing, though, is just how easy it is for a scholar to
do this with modern tools. Enclosed below is an excerpt from the
revision of my essay (which will hopefully be finished in a couple of
days) that dwells on this point.
Concerning Lorrin Garson's message, I agree completely with your
[Harnad's] estimates, and will have some quantitative arguments in my
essay to support them.
XXX. A brave new world
The novel methods of scholarly information dissemination that have been
made possible by modern technology can be seen in the system that I
have started to use recently. All my recent preprints can be accessed
through Mosaic at URL
ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/index.html.Z
(Preprints of some older, already published papers are also available there,
but may have to be removed if publishers complain.) For those without
access to Mosaic, ftp access is available on machine netlib.att.com.
After logging in as "anonymous" and giving the full email address as
password, all the user has to do is give the commands
cd netlib/att/math/odlyzko
binary
get index.Z
to obtain a copy of the (compressed) index file, which describes what
preprints are available. Finally, those without ftp access can send
the message
send index from att/math/odlyzko
to netlib@research.att.com, and the index file will arrive via return
mail, with instructions for retrieving individual papers. (This system
contains more than just my own preprints. For papers of my colleague
Neil Sloane, use the same commands as above, but with "odlyzko"
replaced by "sloane," for example.)
The system described above gives access to my and my colleagues
preprints to all the 20 million users of the Net (as the Internet and
various other networks are called). Moreover, this access is almost
always free (although that might change, as I will discuss later), and
available around the clock (except when networks or computers
malfunction, of course). Further, this access is very easy. What is
most remarkable about it, though, is that it is also easy for me to add
papers to it. All I need to do (once a paper has been typeset in TeX
or LaTeX, say) is to give the commands
latex analytic dvips analytic.dvi > /usr/math/odlyzko/analytic.comp.ps
and edit the file /usr/math/odlyzko/index by adding to it the lines
file att/math/odlyzko/analytic.comp.ps
title Analytic Computations in Number Theory
by Andrew M. Odlyzko
# to appear in "Mathematics of Computation 1943-1993,"
W. Gautschi, ed., Amer. Math. Soc., Proc. Symp. Appl. Math.,
1994.
Everything else is done authomatically by the system, which was written
by Eric Grosse, and which is available for free. (In practice there is
a bit more work, since I also make the source files available in the
src directory, to make text searches easier, but it is not much.)
The only time-consuming part in using Grosse's system is the
typesetting of the paper, but that is something that would be done in
any case. The extra effort needed to make the preprint available is a
matter of a minute or two. This is a dramatic change compared to the
situation of even a few years ago, and certainly to that of a few
decades ago, when the only way for a scholar to communicate with a wide
audience was to go through the slow and expensive process of publishing
in a conventional journal. Now it is possible to reach a much broader
audience with just a few keystrokes.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:33:53 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Re: A Subversive Proposal
From: david@arch.ping.dk (David Stodolsky)
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
Subject: Re: Further subversive matters
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 11:13:21 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: topsoe@euromath.dk
> sh> I do think that pubishers can play a role in this, but then they must
> sh> explicitly rejoin on the subsidized-model end, rather than hoping to
> sh> continue on the trade model.
If we can locate a European Publisher that will cooperate, then there
is a good chance of getting at least of few years of subsidy under
the EU's Fourth Framework for R & D. In the Telematics area, there
is supposedly going to be an emphasis on applications, as opposed
to infrastructure development, which has been the main line so far.
Directorate General XIII/E has already funded exploratory actions in
multimedia publishing, using Third Framework money for feasibility
projects preparing for the Information Engineering program under
the new Fourth Framework. Two of the examples of areas suitable for
pilot applications listed:
:the development of new forms of Sci. & Tech. publishing using networks
and exchangeable media
:sector specific demo projects from electronic products and services
such as electronic newspaper or magazine development
My feeling, however, is that the publishers are a lost cause due to the
conflict of interest. I think a better option is a company that
benefits from the move to on-line access. If scientists are going to
develop their reputations on-line, then security is essential. Maybe
one of the smart card producers would cooperate. I am investigating
these companies in connection with another project and can bring this
up as an option. Network operators also are a possibility. RARE is
coordinating some activity, but I have yet to see anything definite.
For further info fax to:
European Commission
DG XIII, Directorate E
JMO C4/024
L-2920 Luxembourg
Fax: (352) 430132847
Contact: R. F. de Bruine
David S. Stodolsky, PhD Internet: stodolsk@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Peder Lykkes Vej 8, 4. tv. Internet: david@arch.ping.dk
DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark Voice + Fax: + 45 32 97 66 74
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:34:20 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Lorrin Garson (Amer. Chem. Soc.) Reply to Subversive Proposal
Dear Lorrin,
Thanks for your detailed reply about publication costs and electronic
innovations at the American Chemical Society, which is appended below,
for all, as you requested. I am very impressed by the scale of electronic
innovativeness you describe taking place at the ACS.
The status quo I should have said that paper publishers would be
endeavoring to preserve was the trade model itself: pay-to-see, whether
on screen or on paper. You raise a valid point about technical and
graphical capabilities and expenses, and you are right that my own
data, from a mostly-text discipline, are insufficient to establish the
generality of my <25% per-page claim. I will accordingly allow my
colleagues in the more technical disciplines to bring forward their own
figures in response to what you write below. My own reaction to the
impressive panaroma of innovations you describe (apart from admiration
for what you have accomplished) would be the following:
(1) Many the graphical capabilities you describe are likely to be
available on the author/researcher's end these days, as are the
technical-text generating capabilities. So what authors submit for
publication may be very close to the final product (and they could
incorporate editing and design feedback into it in their revision). It
is not at all clear that having these functions instead performed by the
publisher will be either optimal technically or a justification for
sticking to the pay-to-see model instead of the free-access-to-all
model for esoteric publication.
(2) The coding will soon be standardized, or near standardized, so that
will be provided from the author's end too (guided, of course, by
feedback from editors, copy editors and production editors, to which I
will return below), and hence no justification for sticking to the
pay-to-see status quo.
(3) Powerful public-domain search/storage/retrieval tools are already
being developed and made available to all (e.g., wais, www, etc.). So
this too need no longer be something the publisher does for the author,
and is again not a justification for preserving the status quo.
So what seems to remain in the calculations you describe -- assuming
author's end graphics and text-processing plus archive management tools
are in place for all -- is (as I suggested) the true cost of quality
control: refereeing and editing (include copy-editing and design). I
regret that I have to say that I continue to believe that the true cost of
this essential service is well under 25% per page in all fields of
science and scholarship. I will allow those who are more technically
expert than I to follow up on (1) to (3).
One last point: ACS is noncommercial, but is it not worrisome that, as
you describe below, it so readily makes common cause with so many
others who most decidedly are not? Esoteric publishing simply does not
belong in this paradigm.
Best wishes,
Stevan
From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
Subject: Publication costs (cont.)
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad at Princeton University)
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 94 15:57:07 EDT
Stevan,
As of yesterday I am on vacation for three weeks, and about to leave for
British Columbia and Alaska. However, before going, I wanted to respond to
your latest message in our exchange of thought and comments on publishing
costs.
Perhaps the disparity of our cost figures is a consequence of the type of
material we publish. My impression is that journals in the humanities are
much simplier and would therefore be less expensive to create in the
front-end process. In fact, chemistry may be the most challenging of the
sciences with much information in complex tables, display math, graphics---
including chemical structures and other line art, half-tones and color.
Tables, math, and artwork are labor intensive (expensive) to handle whether
for print or electronic products. Also, in the sciences, there are many
special characters and multi-level positioning which must be handled; we have
over 500 special characters for our journals and seven levels of super- and
subscripts (on line, 3 levels above and 3 levels below). These special
characters must also be handled whether on paper or electronically. I must
confess I don't read humanities journals and my experience in this domain is
limited to undergraduate textbooks. But even with undergraduate text books,
there is a marked difference in manufacturing costs because of the difference
in complexity of material.
We are indeed both addressing the issue of what you call "esoteric
publications," that is, scholarly journals for which authors submit
manuscripts without receiving payment or royalty.
Your statement "The entire superstructure is set up to hurtle headlong toward
print on paper . . ." is incorrect. Since 1974 the ACS has been
publishing it's journals on a database structure aimed toward the day when
electronic products would be created. We started preserving our journal data
in an SGML-like structure long before SGML became an ISO standard. Our print
products are spun-off from the database, not the other way around. I am
afraid your perception of how we produce journals is quite erroneous.
Approximately 80-85% of our costs are for creating this database and 15-20%
for printing. The majority is for peer review, processing manuscripts (50%
are now done electronically; this will probably reach 60-80% by the end of
1995), editing, copy-editing, proof-reading, etc.
Also your statement "It's natural for them [paper publishers] to do whatever
they can to preserve the status quo, or something close to it." is also very
inaccurate---certainly incorrect for the the ACS. Let me give you a few
highlights of the ACS' electronic publishing activities:
(a) 1980: One thousand articles from the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry were
loaded on BRS as the first fulltext file in chemistry, probably the first
fulltext file in the sciences. This was an experimental prototype file which
was tested by a few dozen volunteers.
(b) 1981: An experimental file of 16 ACS journals was loaded at BRS. The
coverage was 1976 to current for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and 1980
to current for the other journals. The file was evaluated by about 300
individuals.
(c) 1982: The fulltext of ACS journals file at BRS became a commercial product
in November.
(d) 1984: Our colleagues at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) established STN
International in cooperation with node operators in Karlsruhe, Germany and
Tokyo, Japan. This is a true network with files located at any one node
accessed from Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim. Users are not aware
in day-to-day searching/retrieving on which continent the files are located.
(e) 1985: We developed a prototype CD-ROM in cooperation with OCLC using the
chemistry journal Inorganic Chemistry. This prototype was fulltext
searchable and provided on-the-fly composition with display of our full
character set, including super- and subscripts.
(f) 1986: On September 28th, the ACS made the fulltext of all its chemistry
journals available on STN (the CJACS file). This file allows fulltext
searching and display, but does not contain mathematics, tables or math. The
file is available today and contains our journal data from 1982 to the
present. The file is updated every two weeks.
(g) 1987-90: Files from John Wiley (CJWILEY file ), the Royal Society of
Chemistry (CJRSC file), VCH Publishers (CJVCH), and Elsevier Science
Publishers (CJELSEVIER file) were loaded on STN International. These files
are still available and regularly updated. [My group processes the data for
these publishers for file loading.]
(h) 1990 to date: The ACS has been involved with colleagues at Bellcore, OCLC,
CAS, and Cornell University to create a prototype electronic library at
Cornell University. This is called the CORE project; a non-commercial,
experimental endeavor
(i) 1993: The ACS made supplementary material for the Journal of the American
Chemical Society available on an Internet server (acsinfo@acs.org). These
are TIFF-Group-4-FAX compressed files available for downloading by anonymous
ftp or through a Gopher interface. There are approximately 20,000 pages per
year loaded on the server. The file is still available and is updated
weekly.
(j) 1994-1996: The ACS is a participant in the Red Sage project at the
University of California at San Francisco. Approximately 20 publishers are
involved (with Springer-Verlag being the dominant publisher) along with UCSF
and Bell Laboratories, to create a prototype electronic library in the fields
of radiology and molecular biology.
(k) 1994: On June 19th, the ACS/CAS made electronic pages of all its chemistry
journals available via STN International, thus tables, mathematics, line art
and half-tones are now available by downloading via the Internet, direct dial
modem or by FAX.
(l) 1994: Later this month we will ship the first CD-ROMs of two of our
titles: Journal of the American Chemical Society and Biochemistry. The
CD-ROMs contain fielded, full-text searching capabilities, capability to
display and print journal page images, with special processing of half-tone
images to accommodate non-grey scale printers, display and printing of color
images, etc.
(m) By the end of this year we will have all of the graphics for our journals
as separately callable objects, linked to the text, along with SGML encoded
data, including tables and mathematics.
Stevan, I assure you the ACS as well as most main-line traditional, commercial
publishers of scientific information are not trying to preserve the status
quo but rather are very active in developing electronic information products.
Other not-for-profit organizations in the sciences, notably physics,
astronomy, medicine/biology and engineering, are also very active in this
domain.
By the way, the ACS is a not-for-profit organization, but it is also a
not-for-loss institution. The Publications and Chemical Abstracts Service
Divisions are not subsidized from external sources, nor from ACS members'
dues. These two divisions are charged by the ACS Board of Directors to
annually return a small net to the ACS' reserves.
I would like to suggest that publishing electronic journals is in fact going
to be more expensive than printing. For example, I believe most of the data we
currently publish in journals today will in the future be acquired as
coherent, digital data. This is starting now in the field of x-ray
crystallography and will likely spread to other areas of structure such as
spectroscopy (IR, UV, MS, NMR, etc.), biological data, in vitro testing, etc.
The journal Protein Science (published by Cambridge University Press for the
Protein Society) now publishes with each issue a floppy disk which contains
protein/enzyme structure data which can be visualized with a program called
Kinemage, which is also provided with the journal. The Protein Society plans
to make these data also available on CD-ROM and via the Internet. The
collection, maintenance (including indexing and cataloging), and
dissemination of these data will, I believe, be more costly than printing,
but the information will be much more valuable to the scientific community.
Of course, when we get to this point we won't be publishing journals; the
output will be called something else.
I am afraid you haven't convinced me to your view point and our cost figures
are so diametric we can't possibly both be correct. As I mentioned in my
opening, perhaps the great disparity lies in the nature of the information we
publish. Have I through my verbiage above changed your perceptions of
publishing and associated costs? Probably not . . .
It seems we are unlikely to resolve the issue by merely exchanging messages.
Sometime when you are in Washington area, or when I am in Princeton, why
don't we sit down and try to thrash this out. If on some occasion you should
be in Columbus, Ohio, I would be very happy to walk you through our
production facilities (data entry, database building, composition but not
printing, which is done in Easton, Pennsylvania). In any case, please count
on being my guest for lunch or dinner when and where me might meet.
I won't be responding to e-mail until after July 25th.
Finally, I would like to ask that you forward this message to those to whom
you sent your last message. Thank you.
Best regards,
Lorrin
--
************************** From: Lorrin R. Garson **************************
Publications Division, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C.
E-mail: lrg96@acs.org Phone: (202) 872-4541 FAX (202) 872-4389
*****************************************************************************
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:34:45 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: On Esoteric Publication
> Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 18:54:41 -0400
> From: lesk@bellcore.com (Michael E Lesk)
>
> Steve, Lorrin
>
> I wonder if you both know about an article "Reader rip-off: why are books
> so expensive" by Tony Rothman in the New Republic for Feb. 3, 1992.
>
> He is mostly talking about trade books, and finds most of the cost in
> distribution. He says that a $20 book costs about $3 to produce. (The
> author gets $2, the publisher gets $4 for overhead, the distributor
> gets $3 and the bookstore gets $8). For a 20,000 copy run typesetting is
> not important -- it is 10% of the production cost. Paper is only slightly
> more, about 15% of production cost.
>
> Unfortunately, scientific journals have already achieved his most obvious
> recommendation: eliminate the bookstore retail markup and go to mailorder.
>
> But his overall point is still true- most of the money in the current system
> is NOT going to run presses. It's distribution and organization that is
> taking the money, not the production side. I think that's true for scientific
> journals as well.
>
> Michael
Hi Mike,
I'm sure Rothman's right about those figures, but I think that's probably
more general even than book economics and probably gets to the heart of
capitalism (and middle-men. etc.).
Rather than take all of THAT on, I think the simple pertinent fact in
the case of ESOTERIC (no-market) publication (which makes it different
from sell-your-words trade publication) is that it is NOT a "product"
from which the author does, can or expects to make money through
selling it! That is something peculiar to esoteric publication,
independently either of the mark-ups of trade book/magazine publishing
or commerce in general: THE AUTHOR WANTS YOU TO READ HIS WORK, THAT'S
ALL. That motive should never have had to make common cause with an
economic model in which there is a MARKET for the work, people ready to
pay for it, and the author writing it because he expects to get part of
that revenue -- a model in which it is in the interests of the author as
well as the publisher to interpose a price-tag between the author and
his readership.
This anomaly in the special case of esoteric publishing is in now a
position to be remedied in short order WITHOUT taking on either the
inefficiencies of trade publishing in general, or of trade in general.
Stevan Harnad
esoteric 213 aj
.es-*-'ter-ik
LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN]
1 a aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
1 b aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
2 a aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL]
esoterically 21313 av -i-k(*-)l{e-}
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:35:26 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: More subversion: Ginsparg's Reply to Garson
From ginsparg@qfwfq.lanl.gov Wed Jul 6 01:20:10 1994
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Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 23:19:57 -0600
From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353
Message-Id: <9407060519.AA19350@qfwfq.lanl.gov>
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
Subject: Re: Lorrin Garson (Amer. Chem. Soc.) Reply to Subversive Proposal
Status: R
lg>> From: "Stevan Harnad"
lg>> Subject: Lorrin Garson (Amer. Chem. Soc.) Reply to Subversive Proposal
lg>> ...
lg>> I will allow those who are more technically
lg>> expert than I to follow up on (1) to (3).
stevan,
essentially your responses are correct, but tentative due to unfamiliarity
with publishing technical material including in-line equations, graphics, etc.
in physics, we've been transmitting such material without compromise over
the networks for close to a decade now so i can make slightly more definitive
comments below.
i've lost track of all the different lists (please forward to
whichever may be relevant -- feel free to edit if necessary, have been
through this many times in many forums and answers grow increasingly abrupt).
enjoy, pg
lg> From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
lg> Subject: Publication costs (cont.)
lg> To: harnad@Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad at Princeton University)
lg> Date: Sun, 3 Jul 94 15:57:07 EDT
lg> Perhaps the disparity of our cost figures is a consequence of the type of
lg> material we publish. My impression is that journals in the humanities are
lg> much simplier and would therefore be less expensive to create in the
lg> front-end process. In fact, chemistry may be the most challenging of the
lg> sciences with much information in complex tables, display math, graphics---
lg> including chemical structures and other line art, half-tones and color.
i suspect physics is roughly as challenging as chemistry.
who is providing all of the above material? in physics, we the authors produce
the tables and graphics ourselves, and can typically integrate them into
an electronic end product better than can the publishing companies on paper.
lg> Tables, math, and artwork are labor intensive (expensive) to handle whether
lg> for print or electronic products. Also, in the sciences, there are many
lg> special characters and multilevel positioning which must be handled; we have
lg> over 500 special characters for our journals and seven levels of super- and
lg> subscripts (on line, 3 levels above and 3 levels below).
why are you retypsetting everything provided to you? in physics, the journal
publications are frequently lower quality precisely because of the errors
introduced in the typesetting process (it is very difficult to proofread
yet again something that has already been proofread hundreds of times
for our own versions; especially when many of the conventional pub co's
weren't even running spellcheckers to catch their trivial errors.)
lg> These special characters must also be handled whether on paper or
lg> electronically. I must confess I don't read humanities journals and my
lg> experience in this domain is limited to undergraduate textbooks. But even
lg> with undergraduate text books, there is a marked difference in
lg> manufacturing costs because of the difference in complexity of material.
if handled properly, scientific research can be propagated electronically
as easily as can non-scientific. this is not conjecture -- the e-print
archives on xxx.lanl.gov have from their inception been full text
with all in-line figures and equations (and the astrophysicists have begun
to submit .mpeg files with on-line animation), all author-prepared, and
in no case are any compromises necessary for professional research
communication. as i say, the author produced material is frequently superior
in quality to the ultimate print form from the publisher.
lg> Your statement "The entire superstructure is set up to hurtle headlong
lg> toward print on paper . . ." is incorrect.
lg> ...
lg> Also your statement "It's natural for them [paper publishers] to do whatever
lg> they can to preserve the status quo, or something close to it." is also very
lg> inaccurate---certainly incorrect for the the ACS.
lg> Let me give you a few
lg> highlights of the ACS' electronic publishing activities:
i am afraid that the litany of "achievements" below tends to support rather
than refute stevan's statement. instead they are strawpeople that convey
the impression of forward-looking, but remain too firmly rooted in the
status quo. essentially this view of the electronic format is literally to
repeat the entire process, and then *after* the final stage, essentially as an
afterthought, take an electronic photo (i.e. bitmap) of the finished version,
post it somewhere, and suggest that that constitutes vision for the future.
from this myopic viewpoint, of course the electronic version appears
to add to the overall expense. this just means you'll be hard-pressed to
compete when someone else comes along with a better optimized and
more streamlined operation.
lg> (a) 1980: ...
prior to 1984 the relevant wordprocessing and graphics simply was
not available. any info on usage patterns, cost, etc., is irrelevant.
totally different medium. continuing...
lg> (f) 1986: On September 28th, the ACS made the fulltext of all its chemistry
lg> journals available on STN (the CJACS file). This file allows fulltext
lg> searching and display, but does not contain mathematics, tables or math. The
lg> file is available today and contains our journal data from 1982 to the
lg> present. The file is updated every two weeks.
lg> (g) 1987-90: Files from John Wiley (CJWILEY file ), the Royal Society of
lg> Chemistry (CJRSC file), VCH Publishers (CJVCH), and Elsevier Science
lg> Publishers (CJELSEVIER file) were loaded on STN International.
no mathematics, tables, or math. in physics, this would have been less than
useless and would convince people of the superiority of paper.
lg> (h) 1990 to date: The ACS has been involved with colleagues at Bellcore,
lg> OCLC,CAS, and Cornell University to create a prototype electronic library at
lg> Cornell University. This is called the CORE project; a non-commercial,
lg> experimental endeavor
isn't this just another scan and shred project to post bitmaps
of existing journals? for some reason, many journals seem unable to
distinguish superficial appearance from information content and insist
that they are *defined* by their superficial appearance. (the american
physical society, for example, proposed an electronic version of its
journals which retained every artifact of the paper version -- including
a two column format with equations that occasionally cross between columns.
[a format that many physicists have grown to despise. aps would
likely be subject to a full-scale network attack if they ever ventured to
post new material in such a senseless electronic format.]
it is important to rethink the compromises embodied in the current paper
format and not robotically propagate them to the electronic format.
indeed when i demoed a bitmap server to some physics postdocs, the uniform
response was incredulity ["my god, it's a picture of each page."] then
laughter. we're just not interested in the dead formats promoted in general
by OCLC and e.g. Bell's "rightpages".)
and, again, of course your costs are unaffected or increased -- everything
proceeds as before with an extra step added at the end.
very soon we will demand functionality (hypertext, in-line links to other
resources and applications, public annotation threads, etc.) that can
*only* be embodied in the electronic format from the start.
lg> (i) 1993:The ACS made supplementary material for the Journal of the American
lg> Chemical Society available on an Internet server (acsinfo@acs.org). These
lg> are TIFF-Group-4-FAX compressed files available for downloading by anonymous
lg> ftp or through a Gopher interface. There are approximately 20,000 pages per
lg> year loaded on the server. The file is still available and is updated
lg> weekly.
more after-the-fact bitmaps. not useful, unfortunately.
anyway, rather than continue point by point, i am just trying to emphasize
how all of this substantiates stevan's point that publishers base their
cost estimates of the electronic format on an outmoded mentality,
viewing it as an "add-on" to existing activities rather than
as a means to alter, improve, optimize, and streamline communication
of research in a fundamental manner. there is nothing fundamentally different
about highly technical scientific material as compared with the humanities
-- researchers across the board, once empowered to produce a final format
that suits their standards, and given the means of distribution, will
take full advantage. the likely outcome is to force established publishers
to rethink what they're doing and concede that their cost estimates
were based on the wrong analysis.
lg> Stevan, I assure you the ACS as well as most main-line traditional,
lg> commercial publishers of scientific information are not trying to preserve
lg> the status quo but rather are very active in developing electronic
lg> information products. Other not-for-profit organizations in the sciences,
lg> notably physics, astronomy, medicine/biology and engineering, are also very
lg> active in this domain.
i have met with a continuous stream of representatives from "main-line,
traditional, commercial publishers of scientific information" over the
past three years and yes, they are trying to do *something*, mainly stay
in the ballgame somehow, but that *something* is not necessarily optimized
for the interests of researchers, either in cost, functionality, or means of
access. no idea to which "not-for-profit organizations" you refer in physics
-- there, at least, i believe i know what is going on (perhaps the confusion
is over what constitutes "very active" as opposed to "very productive").
lg> I would like to suggest that publishing electronic journals is in fact going
lg> to be more expensive than printing.
i would like to suggest that those institutions and organizations for whom
publishing electronic journals will in fact prove more expensive than printing
do not have a very bright future in store.
lg> I am afraid you haven't convinced me to your view point and our cost figures
lg> are so diametric we can't possibly both be correct. As I mentioned in my
lg> opening,perhaps the great disparity lies in the nature of the information we
lg> publish.
unlikely.
lg> Have I through my verbiage above changed your perceptions of
lg> publishing and associated costs? Probably not . . .
unfortunately not at all.
Paul Ginsparg
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:36:10 EDT
Reply-To: Christine Sundt
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Christine Sundt
Subject: Publication announcement -- VISUAL RESOURCES
This announcement is being cross-posted to the following lists: VRA-L,
CAAH, IMAGELIB and PHOTO-CD. Please feel free to forward it to other
pertinent lists.
========================================================================
VVV VVV ______________________________________________ RRR RRR\
V // R R
V // VISUAL RESOURCES R R
V // An international journal for scholars and R RRRR/
V // professionals working with the documentation R \\
V// of visual materials - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE R \\
VVV ________________________________________________________ RRR RRR
RECENTLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES
(Volume X, Number 1)
ISSUES IN ELECTRONIC IMAGE (A Special Issue edited by Christine L. Sundt)
EDITORIAL: Reshaping Life and Culture Digitally
Benjamin R. Kessler
Electronic Images in Visual Resources Collections:
Some Strategic Questions
Michael Ester
Digital Images in the Context of Visual Collections
and Scholarship
Deirdre C. Stam
Pondering Pixeled Pictures: Research Directions in the
Digital Imaging of Art Objects
Victoria Wyatt and Ged McLean
Imaging Databases in Research and Teaching: Global
Perspectives and New Research Technologies
William Weinstein
Designing an Image Database: A Holistic Approach
Jim Wallace
Project Chapman: The Direct Delivery of Digital
Smithsonian Photographic Images Via the Internet
MEDIA REVIEWS
Elizabeth O'Donnell
Perseus 1.0: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient
Greece, Gregory Crane (editor-in-chief)
Margaret N. Webster
"The Future of Memories": the Kodak Photo CD System
Visual Resources examines early attempts to document images, assesses the
effect of electronic technology on visual materials, and analyzes new ways to
organize and access visual information. By promoting experimentation and
speculation about visual materials, it provides a unique approach to the
appreciation of visual documentation.
For more information regarding subscriptions, Special Issues, and our book
series, as well as guidelines for submitting manuscripts, please contact the
editors:
Helene E. Roberts Christine L. Sundt
Dartmouth College Architecture & Allied Arts Library
Art History Department University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall
6033 Carpenter Hall Eugene, OR 97403
Hanover, NH 03755
Sample copies of this journal may be obtained from the publisher, Gordon and
Breach, c/o STBS Order Department, P.O. Box 786 Cooper Station, New York, NY
10276, USA or P.O. Box 90, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8JL, UK.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:36:37 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: More Subversion: Now from the mathematicians
From: amo@research.att.com (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 94 07:57 EDT
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
Subject: more subversion
Stevan,
Concerning a bunch of your postings from yesterday, I agree
wholeheardtedly that the issue of costs of electronic publications can
and should be separated from that of peer review. I felt you had
confused the two in your comment on my message to you. The section from
the forthcoming revision of my essay that I had sent you was meant just
to demonstrate how easy it is to disseminate information with modern
technology. It did not deal with quality of the information at all. The
next paragraph in the essay (which I did not send to you) talks of how
the same mechanism can be used by the editor of a journal to
disseminate refereed papers.
At the end of this message I append two additional sections from my
essay that discuss costs of scholarly journals.
Concerning Mike Lesk's message, I agree with you that the figures he
cites are not directly relevant to esoteric scholarly publishing.
However, it is interesting to note that even in the trade press,
electronics is likely to cause substantial changes, and will squeeze
out some of the distribution costs that Mike cites. Publishers are
talking of producing customized textbooks, for example. For one of your
future courses in cognitive psychology, for example, you might choose
from a publisher's catalog what sections you want to go into your
students' textbook. The students will then go to your school's
bookstore and have a copy printed for them on the new machines that
companies like Xerox are developing. (As I recall, Xerox is already
marketing one such machine.) This will eliminate the need for
publishers and bookstores to overstock and ship back and forth tons of
paper that is not used. (The driving force for this development is not
so much the college textbook market, but all the myriad corporate
documents, computer manuals, etc., which are frequently changed and are
typically needed only in small quantities. However, the same technology
will be used in the college textbook market.)
Best regards, Andrew Odlyzko
XXX Costs of present system
To understand the present and future of publishing, we need to have a
clear picture of the costs involved. This involves both the explicit
costs, such as those for journal subscriptions, where money that is
allocated for publications changes hands, and the implicit costs, such
as those for the time of authors and referees.
What is the cost of producing a typical mathematical paper? It appears
that the average researcher publishes two or three papers per year.
The total cost of employing such a person is at least $ 150 K per year
(this is a conservative estimate, over twice the average salary of the
average mathematician in the US, as it is meant to include standard
salary, grant support, benefits, as well as all the office space,
libraries, and university administration costs). Let us assign one
third of this cost to research activities. If we do that, we conclude
that each paper costs at least $ 20,000, and this cost is born by
taxpayers, students' parents, or donors to universities.
The reviewers of scholarly papers are almost uniformly unpaid, and so
are most editors. It is hard to estimate how much effort they devote
to a paper. It appears that about half of the papers in mathematics
that are submitted are accepted by a typical journal. Since many
submissions require several revisions and extensive correspondence, and
an increasing number of papers use two referees, it seems reasonable to
estimate that between one and two weeks' time on the part of editors
and referees is devoted to their jobs for each accepted papers. Thus
the value of their time is around $ 4,000.
In mathematics, there are two main reviewing journals, Mathematical
Reviews (Math. Rev.) and Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik (Zbl.). Both
rely primarily on unpaid outside reviewers. If a reviewer spends a day
preparing a review, reading the paper, locating additional references,
and so on, then the implicit cost is around $ 500 for each reviewing
journal, or $ 1,000 for each published paper.
We next turn to the explicit costs of scholarly publishing. How much
does it cost to publish a paper in a research journal? Let us take the
figures in [AMSS]. If we assume that a paper is typeset with 50,000
characters, and multiply that by the cost per character given in [AMSS]
for any given journal, and then multiply by the circulation for that
journal, we obtain an estimate for how much it costs to publish at
article in that journal. For example, according to [AMSS], Amer. J.
Math. has a circulation of 1458, and an annual subscription costs
$ 0.048 per 1,000 characters. This produces an estimate of
$ 1458*50*0.048, or about $ 3,500 for the cost of publishing a single
article there. This figure includes all the editorial, printing, and
mailing expenses. Doing this for the other journals listed in [AMSS]
for which both costs and circulation are given (but excluding Bull.
Amer. Math. Soc., which differs substantially in scope and especially
circulation from the standard research journals) produces estimates for
single article costs between $ 900 (for the Notre Dame J. Formal Logic)
and $ 8,700. The median cost figure is about $ 4,000, and is the one I
will use.
For comparison, Physical Review Letters (PRL) has about 2,500
institutional subscriptions at about $ 1,500 each, plus 4,500
individual subscriptions at $ 140 each, which together with page
charges produce annual revenue of about $ 5 M. Since PRL publishes
about 2,400 out of the 6,000 submissions it receives each year, the
cost per published paper is about $ 2,000. Since these are all short
papers (extended abstracts only), the relatively high cost is
presumably accounted for largely by PRL having several paid full-time
professional editors.
Reviewing journals are comparatively cheap, if one considers the cost
per paper reviewed. Math. Rev. has annual revenue of around $ 5 M
(about 1,000 subscriptions at $ 5,000 each), so the explicit cost for
each of the 50,000 reviews published each year is $ 100. The figure
for Zbl. is presumably similar. For comparison, Chemical Abstracts
publishes about 500,000 reviews per year at a total cost of $ 150 M,
for a cost per review of $ 300. The much higher monetary cost of these
reviews than those in Math. Rev. is caused by having a paid in-house
staff prepare them instead of relying on the unpaid help of outside
scholars.
Most of the cost of producing traditional scholarly journals is in the
processing of the manuscript (the "first-copy" cost [Grycz]), and very
little in printing and distribution. The PRL individual subscription
price of $ 140 per year is set to cover the marginal cost of printing
and mailing one additional copy of each issue, and the bulk of the
money collected from libraries goes for all the editing and overhead
costs. Similar figures seem to apply to other publishers. The first
copy costs are as high as they are because of the variety of
specialists involved in typesetting the paper, editing it before and
after typesetting, proofreading, and so on.
It is helpful to estimate other costs of publishing scholarly papers.
Typesetting mathematical papers costs between $ 10 and $ 20 per page in
the US, depending on whether one counts all the overheads of a fully
loaded salary or considers just the cost of employing a part-timer on
an occasional basis. Therefore the cost of preparing a typical 20-page
paper is $ 200-400. (When this same paper is typeset by the author,
the implicit cost is likely to be $ 1,000-3,000, both because of higher
wages and lower speed, but the comparison is not relevant, since
scholars who do their own typesetting mix it with the basic composition
of the manuscript.)
While very few editors of mathematical journals are paid, most have
secretarial support, supplied either by their home institution or paid
by the publisher. Based on data from Walter Gautschi, the managing
editor of Math. Comp., and Andrew Appel, the editor-in-chief of ACM
Trans. Progr. Languages, it appears that it is possible to have an
editorial assistant that handles all the correspondence involved in
editing a journal for $ 100-400 per published paper.
XXX How much should journals cost?
Is $ 4,000 per article too much to pay for a scholarly journal
publication? This sum is only a small fraction of the $ 24,000 that
doing the research, writing the paper, and having it reviewed cost.
However, it is an extraordinarily high sum if looked at from another
point of view. If indeed only 20 scholars read the typical paper, then
this means the cost of each reading is $ 200. How many scholars would
not flinch if, on approaching a library shelf, they had to insert $ 200
into a meter for each article they read, even if the money were coming
from their research grant or their department's budget? Serious
readers are not the only constituency for journals, of course.
Tremendous value is derived by scholars from skimming articles to learn
what has been done and approximately how. Many more articles are
skimmed than read. However, even if the typical article is skimmed by
200 scholars, then the cost per article is still $ 20. How many
scholars would be willing to pay that, if the cost were stated
explicitly this way? Of course, they or their institutions are paying
this sum, but the cost is concealed in separate budgets. This high
cost, and scholars' general unwillingness to pay such astronomical
prices, is likely to doom any efforts to have pay-per-view in scholarly
publications, at least with present prices, as charges sufficient to
recover current high costs would deter readers.
Another way to look at the cost figures is to consider the total cost
of journals. Let us recall that 50,000 mathematical papers are
published each year, so the total cost of traditional mathematical
journals is about $ 200 M per year. If we assume that 35 % of this
cost is paid by subscribers in the US (which is probably a low
estimate), then we find that US universities, laboratories, and
individuals spend $ 70 M per year for mathematical journals. That is
almost exactly the same as the NSF budget for mathematical research.
If we could eliminate this cost, we could potentially double the NSF
budget for mathematics at no extra cost to society at large. (If we
eliminated all the other library costs by converting even old
publications to electronic formats, we could save another $ 70-150 M
per year in the US, which could be used to increase research funding
even further.) Of course, the tradeoff is not that simple, since
journals are paid for from different sources than research grants, and
we do not have much freedom in moving public and private funding
around. However, the $ 70 M figure for just journal subscriptions is
sufficiently large that it cannot easily grow, and there will be
pressure to lower it if some method for doing so can be found. One of
the main influences of new electronic technologies is likely to be to
focus attention on the high costs of scholarly publishing.
To what extent can publishing costs be lowered? Some publishers have
predicted that electronic publication of journals would lower the costs
only by around 30 %, which is only slightly more than the cost of
printing and mailing. However, that assumes that the current editing
procedures are followed. If one lowers the standards, then even
traditional paper journals could be produced at a fraction (between one
tenth and one quarter) of the present $ 4,000 per article. After all,
one can xerox author-prepared manuscripts, staple them together, and
call that a journal issue. The present scholarly publishing system has
evolved into its present high-cost state only because of its strange
nature. The ultimate consumers, the scholars, do not pay directly for
the journals, and are seldom even aware of the costs of the
publications they demand. They have never been presented with a range
of cost and quality options and asked to choose among them. The
publishers do not compete on price, but engage in "monopolistic
competition," [Grycz], in which different journals present incomparable
material, and strive to be the best in a specialized area. This system
has many features in common with the US medical system, another
producer of high-quality but also extremely high-priced services. If
there were a single US federal agency responsible for scholarly
publications, there would undoubtedly be Congressional hearings
featuring outcries against the $ 200 cost of each article read by a
scholar instead of the $ 500 flashlight for the military. There would
be questions whether scholars were not using Cadillacs where Chevys (or
even bicycles) would do. Personally I do like the high quality of
present journals. I have published many papers in them, and expect to
publish quite a few more before they disappear. However, I suspect
that society will not be willing to continue paying the price for them.
A few years ago, drastic decreases in the costs of journals would have
meant going from Cadillacs to bicycles, with journals consisting of
stapled collections of mimeographed copies. However, with the advances
in technology described in previous sections, we can now easily move to
something that is at least at the level of a Chevy in luxury, and in
addition has the cross-country capabilities of a helicopter. One
solution is to transform current journals into much cheaper electronic
ones. Eliminating printing and distribution would by itself save
15-30% of the present costs. However, much larger savings should be
possible. This would require reengineering the entire publishing
enterprise so as to eliminate whole layers of specialists, just as many
other businesses have had to do. Recall that keyboarding a paper costs
only $ 200-400, and is currently mostly provided by the author's
institution or is done by the author. All the correspondence about the
paper can be handled by an assistant for $ 100-200 per paper, and this
cost is likely to decrease as communications moves further towards
email. It should be possible to provide editing assistance for
$ 200-600 per (already typeset) paper that would achieve reasonable
quality. What would be lost? Many of the features of the existing
system would be gone, as a typical paper might be processed by just a
single editing generalist who would combine many of the roles of
today's editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. The uniformity of
appearance of papers in a journal might be gone. Would that be a great
loss, though? Should not the unit of scholarly publication be the
individual paper, and not the journal issue? For bulky paper
publications, it was natural to bundle them into larger packages. Most
of the time, though, a scholar reads or even skims only a couple of
articles per issue. Since most of the literature searching involves
moving between different journals with different formats, why bother to
keep uniform style in each journal? A uniform style of journal
references also contributes to the quality of present publications.
However, just how valuable is it, and how valuable will it be in the
future, when each reference might have a hypertext link to the paper
being referenced, or at least something like the URL address?
My general conclusion is that it should be possible to publish
scholarly journals electronically for well under $ 1,000 per article,
and probably under $ 500, without losing too much quality. This agrees
with Harnad's contention [YY] that electronic scholarly publication
should not cost more than one quarter of what it does now. The cost of
reading a single article is still going to be so high as to make
per-per-view impractical, but various of the site-license models
discussed in [Grycz] should allow for recovery of these costs.
Can explicit costs be lowered even further? One approach that is
already widely used among existing electronic journals is to provide
free access, with all the labor involved in running them performed by
scholars. My feeling is that this model is likely to predominate.
This will mean creating some additional costs for the authors, editors,
and their institutions, but those are not likely to be large.
Publishers and librarians often scoff at the idea of scholars being
their own publishers. However, they appear to be underestimating how
easy that is with the recent advances in technology. Editors and
referees already put about as much effort into running scholarly
journals as do the publishers. The additional effort needed to publish
an electronic journal is slight, especially if we relax standards about
appearance. (It's worth emphasizing that we are not talking of
changing the peer review standards. Those are maintained by the unpaid
editors and referees anyway, and can be maintained at the same level in
free electronic journals.) The example in Section YY of the system
that my colleagues and I use for preprint distribution shows just how
easy it is to operate a rudimentary electronic journal.
Will scholars accept the quality of papers produced by other scholars
without the help of the skilled professionals that publishers provide?
My feeling is that they will, especially since the gap between what an
author can produce and what publishers provide is steadily narrowing
with advances in hardware and software. As evidence, consider the
increasing number of books that are produced by publishers taking the
authors' PostScript files and printing them. Authors have to write
their manuscripts anyway, and with modern tools this is becoming as
easy to do at the terminal as on paper, even for technical material.
Most of the high cost of traditional publishing is caused by the need
for communication and cooperation among the many experts involved in
the process. With modern technology, doing something is becoming easier
than explaining to somebody else what to do.
[further discussion of free scholarly journals to come]
> Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 18:54:41 -0400
> From: lesk@bellcore.com (Michael E Lesk)
>
> Steve, Lorrin
>
> I wonder if you both know about an article "Reader rip-off: why are books
> so expensive" by Tony Rothman in the New Republic for Feb. 3, 1992.
>
> He is mostly talking about trade books, and finds most of the cost in
> distribution. He says that a $20 book costs about $3 to produce. (The
> author gets $2, the publisher gets $4 for overhead, the distributor
> gets $3 and the bookstore gets $8). For a 20,000 copy run typesetting is
> not important -- it is 10% of the production cost. Paper is only slightly
> more, about 15% of production cost.
>
> Unfortunately, scientific journals have already achieved his most obvious
> recommendation: eliminate the bookstore retail markup and go to mailorder.
>
> But his overall point is still true- most of the money in the current system
> is NOT going to run presses. It's distribution and organization that is
> taking the money, not the production side. I think that's true for scientific
> journals as well.
>
> Michael
Hi Mike,
I'm sure Rothman's right about those figures, but I think that's probably
more general even than book economics and probably gets to the heart of
capitalism (and middle-men. etc.).
Rather than take all of THAT on, I think the simple pertinent fact in
the case of ESOTERIC (no-market) publication (which makes it different
from sell-your-words trade publication) is that it is NOT a "product"
from which the author does, can or expects to make money through
selling it! That is something peculiar to esoteric publication,
independently either of the mark-ups of trade book/magazine publishing
or commerce in general: THE AUTHOR WANTS YOU TO READ HIS WORK, THAT'S
ALL. That motive should never have had to make common cause with an
economic model in which there is a MARKET for the work, people ready to
pay for it, and the author writing it because he expects to get part of
that revenue -- a model in which it is in the interests of the author as
well as the publisher to interpose a price-tag between the author and
his readership.
This anomaly in the special case of esoteric publishing is now in a
position to be remedied in short order WITHOUT taking on either the
inefficiencies of trade publishing in general, or of trade in general.
Stevan Harnad
esoteric 213 aj .es-*-'ter-ik
LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN]
1 a aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
1 b aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
2 a aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL]
esoterically 21313 av -i-k(*-)l{e-}
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:37:22 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: (fwd) Library Role in Archiving
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 94 14:42:44 EDT
From: Peter Graham
One of the points Paul Ginsparg makes that bears thinking about is the
proposal that various archives be established, e.g. by scholarly societies
but also presumably by other agencies.
Let me condense an argument very much by suggesting that this function is
what libraries are for, perhaps uniquely for: the long-term preservation
function. Some of us in the library community have been discussing what it
is that libraries bring distinctively to the electronic environment. One of
the functions is the continuing one of assuring that information that is here
today is also here tomorrow (as I sometimes like to put it, If I love this
information in May will it still be here in December?).
Libraries, unlike publishers, individual scholars, and scholarly societies,
are explicitly in this for the long term. I think it is our responsibility
in the library community to determine what is necessary for long-term
provision of information. This will include matters such as
--backup
--technology (hardware) refreshing (e.g. from vax to unix to ?, from 5.25"
floppy to 3.5" floppy to ?, from magnetic disk to optical disk to crystal,
etc.)
--technology (software) refreshing (e.g. from Wordperfect 1.1 to v6.0, from
DisplayWrite to Word, from LaTeX to ?, from CorelDraw to ?, etc.).
--accessibly search engines
--authenticity and completeness
--long-term commmitments of people, money and systems (this being the hardest
thing of all) in an environment where budgets are typically only annual.
There's more to say but this thread tends to bunch up in indigestible chunks
anyway, so I shove this out to get this ball rolling. (metaphor?) --pg
Peter Graham psgraham@gandalf.rutgers.edu Rutgers University Libraries
169 College Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08903 (908)445-5908; fax (908)445-5888
CHANGE 7/1 from (908)932-xxxx to (908) 445-xxxx (not all of Rutgers changes)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:38:37 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Entlich Reply to Ginsparg
From: Richard Entlich
Subject: Re: Ginsparg's Reply to Garson
To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 94 13:53:12 EDT
Stevan,
You forwarded Paul Ginsparg's comments on Lorrin Garson's response to
your "subversive" proposal to VPIEJ-L and perhaps elsewhere. Please
forward my comments to whatever lists you sent his comments.
Dr. Ginsparg['s]...
comments on the CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment) project
are ill-informed. First of all, CORE was not conceived, nor has it ever
been portrayed as a model for de novo electronic publishing. CORE is a
retrospective conversion project, designed to test the efficacy of a
variety of approaches to capturing previously published material, using
whatever combination of machine-readable formats may be available or
obtainable through conversion. Perhaps high energy physicists have no
interest in anything published more than a few picoseconds ago, but in most
disciplines, the existing print corpus has ongoing value.
Yes, CORE is using bitmapped page images, but it is hardly "another scan
and shred project to post bitmaps of existing journals." Full-page
bitmaps are used 1) because they are a reasonable alternative for
conversion of existing print archives to machine-readable form, and 2)
to capture portions of pages which were not available in machine-
readable form, mainly illustrations of various types. However, the heart
of the CORE project is over ten years of marked-up machine-readable text
files from twenty ACS journals. These files are converted from ACS
proprietary markup to SGML.
The resulting files can be searched, displayed and navigated via
a sophisticated X Window based interface developed by OCLC called
Scepter. Full-text searching is provided (including about two dozen
fields, from author and title to CAS registry number and figure
captions) and supports Boolean and adjacency operators, truncation, and
direct searching on Greek letters and diacritics. Text is displayed
using standard and custom-designed X Window fonts. The interface also
supports direct access to article subsections, hypertext searching and
citation linking, and full article printing.
Article text, equations and tables are all displayed based on the
existing machine-readable files. Only figures are displayed as bitmaps.
CORE makes the best possible use of these bitmaps by extracting them
from the full-page image file and making them accessible from icons
embedded in the text. In Scepter, they are also displayed thumbnail size
along with the article front matter so they can be browsed as a kind of
"visual abstract."
Another important element of CORE is that it is based on a large corpus
of highly regarded publications, spanning many subdisciplines within
chemistry. In addition to working out technical problems, CORE was
designed to test user acceptance of network journal delivery in a
variety of formats. A large enough body of material to create more than
a "toy" system was seen as essential to the user testing process.
Perhaps physicists are content with downloading TeK source or
PostScript, but Ginsparg's system will not necessarily translate
smoothly to other disciplines, at least not right away.
Not every group of scholars has the same degree of computing
sophistication, or access to state-of-the-art computing equipment. Not
everyone has ready access and familiarity with Unix workstations or can
afford to replace equipment in order to keep pace with the latest
network fad. For instance, there are still plenty of Macintoshes and PCs
around which cannot run NCSA Mosaic.
I recognize that Ginsparg wants to make every physicist a self-publisher
and believes that his colleagues all share that desire and are equipped
to do so. Perhaps the pervasive use of computers in physics and
established standard of TeK for manuscript preparation makes this
reasonable--for physics. But even physicians, who are, as a group,
wealthy and fairly technically literate, have expressed doubts about
electronic journals. (See, for example, JAMA, May 6, 1992, vol.267,
no.17, p.2374 and The New England Journal of Medicine, Jan. 16, 1992,
vol.326, no. 3, pp.195-97). Some of their concerns focus on the peer
review process, but others focus on the expense of computing equipment,
and lack of format standardization for manuscript generation.
And speaking of medicine, Ginsparg takes a shot at "...dead formats
promoted in general by OCLC." OCLC happens to co-publish (with AAAS) an
electronic journal in medicine, the Online Journal of Current Clinical
Trials. Though I am in no way a spokesperson for OCLC, I am puzzled at
Ginsparg's comments. OCLC has done pioneering work in the creation of de
novo networked electronic journals, most of which is based on TeK and
SGML. These hardly qualify as "dead formats."
Lest I come off sounding like an apologist for the publishing community,
let me make my position clear. As a librarian, I am acutely aware of the
down side of print publishing in terms of cost, distribution, access,
time lag, functionality, space requirements, preservation, etc.
Libraries have been too reluctant to embrace new technologies which
offer potential solutions to some of these problems. But it is also
hardly the case that Ginsparg's system resolves all the myriad issues
involved in the transition from print to electronic publishing and
distribution of scholarly articles. Some of the reticence on the part of
libraries reflects the tremendous flux and lack of standardization in
information technology. One does not throw out a proven, centuries old
system, whatever its flaws and limitations, without solid assurance that
its replacement is a reliable, stable substitute for the long-term.
I am as excited as anyone working in the electronic journal area about
the promise of new technologies. I also recognize that progress towards
network publishing will probably cause upheaval within libraries and
very likely the disappearance of some. Libraries will attempt to find
continuing relevance. Nevertheless, we will not support print publishing
when it ceases to meet the needs of our patrons. In the meantime,
despite the success of Ginsparg's preprint system, more research is
needed in the areas of interface design, organization and classification
of machine-readable files, the creation of machine-readable archives
which will remain accessible for centuries, etc. Even though it is based
on previously published material, CORE is helping to address some of
these thorny issues.
--Richard Entlich
Technical Project Manager
Albert R. Mann Library, Information Technology Section
Cornell University
entlich@cornell.edu
(Note: some of the above comments are based on a talk I gave at the 9th
annual NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) conference in
Vancouver, BC last month and will subsequently appear in the conference
proceedings.)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:43:13 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Ginsparg's Reply to Entlich
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 94 20:17:21 -0600
From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353
Subject: Re: Entlich Reply to Ginsparg
richard entlich's remarks miss the point. the point i was trying to
make was that garson's examples of electronic involvement were all
irrelevant to the argument at hand, that of cost estimates for true
electronic research distribution, and were just confusing the issues.
i'm eager to see other kinds of publishing efforts that look promising.
i offer the physics and related servers as an example to others who
might want to do something similar; various features clearly will not be
applicable for all communities. others can learn from our mistakes.
(o'donnell's Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (MIT Press)
will be a most interesting experiment -- to see if they can provide
sufficient "value-added" for which people will voluntarily pay.)
> [Ginsparg's] comments on the CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment)
> project are ill-informed. First of all, CORE was not conceived, nor has it
> ever been portrayed as a model for de novo electronic publishing. CORE is a
> retrospective conversion project,
correct, that's precisely why i identified it as irrelevant to the question of
costs of an enterprise that starts electronic from inception.
> Perhaps high energy physicists have no
> interest in anything published more than a few picoseconds ago, but in most
> disciplines, the existing print corpus has ongoing value.
my community accesses the archival database (journals in libraries) as
well as the growing electronic one, never argued otherwise -- not sure
why we're being reviled here. how best to port the archival database to
electronic format is an important question, it is just not relevant to
the issue at hand, as mentioned above. (and this is neither the proper
forum to give an exhaustive technical critique of the "sophisticated X
Window based interface developed by OCLC called Scepter.")
> In addition to working out technical problems, CORE was
> designed to test user acceptance of network journal delivery in a
> variety of formats.
the report i heard from the head librarian at cornell (harvard
"gateways to knowledge" meeting last fall) was that user acceptance was
remarkably low for reasons they did not yet understand.
> Perhaps physicists are content with downloading TeK source or
> PostScript, but Ginsparg's system will not necessarily translate
> smoothly to other disciplines, at least not right away.
that's TeX (the X according to Knuth is a chi, hence the pronunciation).
undoubtedly it won't transfer smoothly, i have no doubt there are many
features peculiar to my community. but we are looking towards the
future and can envision a gradual transition. different communities
will have different standards. perhaps no matter what word-processor is
used, they may be able to choose the final output format (as we
currently choose postscript for some applications): acrobat pdf, sgml,
or some other -- all readily interconvertible. five years from now, the
options for author-prepared documents are guaranted to be dramatically
improved over now; and each generation of more sophisticated software
grows *easier* to use. the point is to start thinking ahead now.
> For instance, there are still plenty of Macintoshes and PCs
> around which cannot run NCSA Mosaic.
not sure i understand this comment. we've got macmosaic running here
on the lowest end mac classic -- probably just means there are some macs
and pc's not connected to the internet because no one installed mactcp
or equivalent. it is true that the windows version of mosaic will not
run on a pc that cannot run windows, but there will always be a mix of
technology at any given time and servers can always provide a lowest common
denominator interface (the systems i set up still allow for equal low-end
e-mail access via dumb terminal and printer).
the important point is that many communities will find self-sufficiency
in their interests, and they will proceed accordingly.
> OCLC happens to co-publish (with AAAS) an electronic journal in medicine,
> the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials.
yes, this was announced with great fanfare in mid '92. it required
proprietary software that ran on low-end pc's ("for instance there are
still plenty" of high end machines that do not run low-end pc
emulation. in a few years will there be more of these or more "macs and
pcs around which cannot run ncsa mosaic"?) and was far from
state-of-the-art even at the time (i remember discussing this with
representatives of other publishing companies.) after more than half a
year it had published a grand total of only seven submissions (as
reported in Science, another AAAS publication), and was used as the
standard example of how not to proceed. i do not have statistics for
how it is currently faring, but perhaps they have since made
improvements to correct the deficiencies -- might even provide some
solid basis for the 25% vs 75% cost question, but not if they're still
too remote from critical mass.
> OCLC has done pioneering work in the creation of de
> novo networked electronic journals, most of which is based on TeK and
> SGML. These hardly qualify as "dead formats."
as i mentioned in my message to andrew o., as a member of an aps advisory
board i've seen their more recent proposals and while it is inappropriate
to comment in detail here, i can readily affirm that there's nothing
that impacts the issue of costs of publishing scientific vs.
non-scientific material.
> Lest I come off sounding like an apologist for the publishing community,
> let me make my position clear. As a librarian, I am acutely aware of the
> down side of print publishing in terms of cost, distribution, access,
> time lag, functionality, space requirements, preservation, etc.
> Libraries have been too reluctant to embrace new technologies which
> offer potential solutions to some of these problems.
and i am entirely sympathetic to the plight of librarians for whom
committing prematurely to the wrong technology would be a disaster.
and i am sympathetic because i've always been a fan of libraries
and librarians (aren't all academics?) and they're as much victims of
the practices of pub co's as we are.
> But it is also hardly the case that Ginsparg's system resolves all the
> myriad issues involved in the transition from print to electronic
> publishing and distribution of scholarly articles.
no argument.
> Some of the reticence on the part of libraries reflects the tremendous flux
> and lack of standardization in information technology. One does not throw
> out a proven, centuries old system, whatever its flaws and limitations,
> without solid assurance that its replacement is a reliable, stable
> substitute for the long-term.
no argument. this is why it's so much easier for us to test the envelope --
the consequences of failure are less pronounced.
> I am as excited as anyone working in the electronic journal area about
> the promise of new technologies. I also recognize that progress towards
> network publishing will probably cause upheaval within libraries and
> very likely the disappearance of some. Libraries will attempt to find
> continuing relevance.
important issues. and by no means clear at present what will be the
evolving role of libraries (and in particular of university research
libraries which satisfy a wide variety of different needs). perhaps
they will be out of the loop entirely for many aspects of scholarly
research communication, or perhaps they will become the natural local
repositories to organize and serve this information to the rest of the
world. cornell's mann library is clearly ahead of the game in technical
sophistication (i have no problem with that, i got my doctorate from
cornell) so may not be the best short-term model for involvement from
the library community, e.g.:
> the creation of machine-readable archives
> which will remain accessible for centuries, etc. Even though it is based
> on previously published material, CORE is helping to address some of
> these thorny issues.
very few libraries currently have dedicated resources to address these
issues. but in the most optimistic scenario, perhaps this will become
commonplace in a few years and libraries and research communities can
become partners in subversion to their mutual benefit. time will tell.
none of these issues impact the cost distinction between scientific and
non-scientific publication, however, and that was the original issue.
Paul Ginsparg
PS
it is still not clear exactly how things will proceed from community to
community -- harnad's original "subversion" proposal passed to an economist
got back:
>> ... but Harnad is a bit off (at least for econ types). Most of
>> them care less about whether others read their stuff, what is important is
>> publishing because that is what determines salary and promotion (chairs and
>> deans). My guess is that around 2011 his vision will happen and journals
>> will be a thing of the past, and I will be retired.
(c.f. harnad on compos mentis; but also comment a bit off of course for usual
reason that the on-line versions will ultimately receive similar certification
in your scheme and be used [or abused] for allocation of jobs, promotions,
and grant money.)
[SH: Of course Paul's reply is exactly the right one for this
chesnut about promotion credit, etc. It's yet another example
of one of those prima facie questions, so easily answered, that
keeps resurfacing anew somewhere else every time it's laid to
rest...]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract of paper presented at ASIS 1992 SESSIONS ON:
"FULL-TEXT ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO PERIODICALS," sponsored by the
ASIS Special Interest Group on Library Automation and
Networking (SIG/LAN) and the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL) at the 55th ASIS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh Hilton,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 26-29, 1992. Session II.
Full-Text Electronic Access to Periodicals: Strategies for
Implementation
WHAT SCHOLARS WANT AND NEED FROM ELECTRONIC JOURNALS
Stevan Harnad
It is useful to remind ourselves now and again why scholars and
scientists do what they do, rather than going straight into the junk
bond market: They presumably want to contribute to mankind's cumulative
knowledge. They have to make a living too, of course, but if doing that
as comfortably and prosperously as possible were their primary motive
they could surely find better ways. Prestige no doubt matters too, but
here again there are less rigororous roads one might have taken than
that of learned inquiry. So scholars publish not primarily to pad
their CVs or to earn royalties on their words, but to inform their peers
of their findings, and to be informed by them in turn, in that
collaborative, interactive spiral whereby mankind's knowledge
increases. My own estimate is that the electronic medium has the
potential to extend individual scholars' intellectual life-lines (i.e.,
the size of their lifelong contribution) by an order of magnitude.
For scholars and scientists, paper is not an end but a means. It has
served us well for several millenia, but it would have been suprising
indeed if this man-made medium had turned out to be optimal for all
time. In reality, paper has always had one notable drawback: its
turnaround time. Although it allowed us to encode, preserve and share
ideas and findings incomparably more effectively than we could ever
have done orally, its tempo was always significantly slower than the
oral interactions to which the speed of thought seems to be organically
adapted. Electronic journals have now made it possible for scholarly
publication to escape this rate-limiting constraint of the paper
medium, allowing scholarly communication to become much more rapid,
global and interactive than ever before. It is important that we not
allow the realization of the new medium's revolutionary potential to be
retarded by clinging superstitiously to familiar but incidental
features of the paper medium.
What scholars accordingly need is electronic journals that provide:
(1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and
publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer
commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and
retrievable electronic archive. Ideally, the true costs of providing
these services should be subsidized by Universities, Learned Societies,
Libraries and the Government, but if they must be passed on to the
"scholar-consumer," let us make sure that they are only the real costs,
and not further unnecessary ones arising from emulating inessential
features of the old medium.
For scholars and scientists the greatest disadvantage of paper
publication has always been its turnaround time, which is hopelessly
out of phase with the human thought process. Electronic networked
publication now makes it possible for the first time in the history of
learned inquiry to explore the full interactive potential of the human
brain in a medium that provides the discipline, permanence, and quality
control of the peer-reviewed written medium along with the speed, scope
and interactiveness of a "live" global symposium. PSYCOLOQUY is a
refereed electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological
Association and dedicated to "Scholarly Skywriting": "target articles"
reporting important new ideas and findings followed closely by multiple
peer commentary and authors' responses. It is in its unique capacity
for interactive publication that the revolutionary potential of the new
medium lies rather than in its capacity to duplicate the features of
paper publication in a faster and cheaper form.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 08:44:00 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Familiar prima facie worries...
The following questions from Bill Turner at Cornell Library fall in the
category of "prima facie" worries that get voiced over and over. One
replies to the them, only to hear them resurface somewhere else as
vociferously as ever. There ARE some profound questions about electronic
publishing, but, alas, these are not they! These are questions based
entirely on old papyrocentric thinking and habits. Nothing personal
about Bill! Many, many others have asked the exact same questions. I had
planned to write an article for Serials Review, laying them to rest once
and for all (and still hope to do so, if I ever find the time to for it);
and I carry them around (along with 30 or so further prima facie
questions) on transparencies, ready to fix their wagon every time I
give a talk. So hear goes, for the Nth time...:
> Date: Wed, 06 Jul 94 10:55:33 EDT
> From: Bill Turner - Cornell University Library
> Status: RO
>
> Steven, I am in agreement with much of what you are saying about
> electronic publishing etc., but I think you (and MANY others) are
> totally ignoring the hard questions about electronic publishing.
>
> Is there a real archive? Is it guaranteed to always be there?
Bill,
Is there a real paper archive, and is it guaranteed to be always there?
If so, why? and who/what underwrites the guarantee? Whatever your
reply in the case of paper, the SAME reply (mutatis mutandis) applies
to electronic archiving. Paper is an object; tapes are objects; disks
are objects. The safest way to protect a flotilla of objects is to make
them redundant, distribute them the world over, and have professionals
(scholars and librarians for the most part, in the case of scholarly
texts) devoted to preserving them for posterity. In the case of
electronic archives, this includes making sure that texts get
transfered with every technology upgrade.
There is absolutely no problem in principle here. Nothing unique to
electronic archiving. And in fact the electronic archive is potentially
much more powerful, efficient, accessible, and inexpensive.
> How do I know that what I have retrieved from the network is what you
> wrote?
How do you know in the case of a paper text? Chicanery is possible there
too. Why don't we worry about it? Well, in the case of esoteric paper
publication (which is the kind I'm interested in) it's rarely of any
interest to anyone to tamper with it, but if it is, it COULD be
protected, at least to the level of the encryption of military secrets:
Is that secure enough?
> If you decide your work contained an error, how do you correct the
> multitude of copies out there?
How do you do it in paper? Publish an erratum or a second edition. The
Net has the virtue of being able to make prominent pointers and links
to other items along a "thread" of scholarship, including errata and
new editions.
Again, no problem WHATSOEVER that is peculiar to electronics over paper;
the instinct that there somehow is is simply a paper-bred illusion.
> If you notice that someone ELSE's work contains errors, how do you do
> anything about it?
Need I go on? What do you do in paper? Do the same (much more
powerfully and efficiently) in the Virtual Library.
> What do you do about malicious mischief?
There ARE some real security problems on the Net. But esoteric
publication is far from being at the greatest risk; encrypted,
distributed, off-loaded archives, faithfully maintained, are probably
more than good enough for scholarship and science except in rare special
cases where even more stringent measures are possible.
> We have a real "caveat emptor" situation being actively pursued by
> people who in some cases have a particular axe to grind (they think
> publishers are getting filthy rich and want to stop it), and they are
> willing to accept great losses so long as the publishers are hurt
> worse.
I know there are some such people, but I am certainly not one of them. I
am quite aware that esoteric scholarly publication is not a gold mine, like
movies and the tabloids. I'm grateful publishers do it; I would just
like to see them adjust to the new, non-trade model that electronic
publishing now makes possible.
> Would you REALLY entrust any critical information to the Internet right
> now? Bill Turner
Please address this to the 20,000 physicists world-wide who are doing
just that, in Paul Ginsparg's Archive, to the tune of 35,000 "hits"
per day! In the past I had had occasion to call much of Usenet a "global
graffiti board for trivial pursuit," but thanks to Paul Ginsparg, plus
the editors of some brave new electronic journals, a portion of
cyberspace is now being carved out where scholars and scientists really
CAN feel secure in entrusting their intellectual wares.
Stevan Harnad
Editor, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, PSYCOLOQUY
Cognitive Science Laboratory
Princeton University
221 Nassau Street
Princeton NJ 08544-2093
harnad@princeton.edu
609-921-7771
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 13:57:57 EDT
Reply-To: Richard Entlich
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Richard Entlich
Subject: Re: Ginsparg's Reply to Entlich
In-Reply-To: from "Stevan Harnad" at Jul 11, 94 8:43 am
>richard entlich's remarks miss the point. the point i was trying to
>make was that garson's examples of electronic involvement were all
>irrelevant to the argument at hand, that of cost estimates for true
>electronic research distribution, and were just confusing the issues.
Paul Ginsparg's intention may have been as stated above, but part of the
effect was to promulgate a highly misleading description and unjustified
criticism of a project in which I (and many others) have invested several
years. (This accounts for the angry tone of my original response). The
CORE Project is obviously fair game for criticism, but even if that
criticism was a sidebar to Ginsparg's thesis, it should have been based
on fact, not speculation.
>(and this is neither the proper forum to give an exhaustive technical
>critique of the "sophisticated X Window based interface developed by OCLC
>called Scepter.")
Since the technical aspects of the CORE Project were inaccurately
portrayed in this forum, what forum but this should be used to provide
technical details which set the record straight?
Anyone interested in a brief summary and bibliography about the CORE
Project may request one from me at the address given below.
--Richard Entlich
Mann Library, Cornell University
entlich@cornell.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 1994 09:08:22 EDT
Reply-To: Guido Van Garsse AKSES LIBRARY
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Guido Van Garsse AKSES LIBRARY
Subject: telepublishing
%TO VPIEJ-L@VTVM1
We just finished a marketing & feasibility report on STM networkpublishing
Vol.1: resources analysis
Vol.2: costs and feasibility of STM telepublishing
Vol.3: director