VPIEJ-L Discussion Archives
August 1994
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 08:54:16 EDT
Reply-To: Judith Gresham
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Judith Gresham
Subject: Re: VT Model
In-Reply-To: <199407301633.JAA30436@eis.calstate.edu>
I found this discourse interesting because--
I am proficient with producing attractive and readable paper publications
(newletters, manuals, etc.).
I accepted a position to produce a newletter for a new organization,
and found the newsletter was to be distributed soley through e-mail. The
mix of services used by the members precludes attaching files to some.
This means the newletter must be pure ASCII and self-contained within the
e-mail message. I find I have to rethink my presentation.
While one would think that scholarly journals are content-oriented and
not subject to the above problems, one must remember that tables of data
are included that extend beyond an 80-column limitation. Some may
include illustrations. I have found some on-line documents that merely
delete the tables.
Unfortunately, one must plan for the lowest common denominator and/or
devise alternative delivery systems for tables and illustrations.
Judith
San Bernardino, CA
On Sat, 30 Jul 1994, Gail McMillan wrote:
> >To: boudreau@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael R. Boudreau)
> >From: gailmac@vt.edu (Gail McMillan)
> >Subject: Re: VT Model
> >
> >Thank you for send me your thoughts about the VT Model posted to VPIEJ-L
> earlier this week. I'm responding to you though I'd like your permission to
> post our comments to the list. Like I said initially, I certainly don't
> have all the answers but the idea is a sound one that could serve publishers
> and libraries well if the collaborate.
>
> ******Gail,
> Of course you may post our comments to the list. I thought I had posted
> mine to the whole list; did they go only to you? (Must be a result of how
> the list header is set up.) Anyway, I have some clarifications, but I'll
> wait until I see your responses on the list.
> --Mike B.*****
> >
> >>Following are some comments on the VT Model for journal publishing. I find
> >>the idea interesting, particularly its aim to capitalize on the distinction
> >>between "browsing" and "directed searching," but I also find some of its
> >>underlying assumptions to be questionable.
> >>
> >>
> >>>Electronic networks offer wonderful new tools for directed
> >>>searching. It is now possible (and software is available on
> >>>a few platforms) to embed an active link in a paper as a
> >>>reference to another paper. Selecting the link automatically
> >>>locates and opens a copy of the second paper. Electronic
> >>>preprint collections and tools like this make it likely that
> >>>publishers will lose control of the directed-search mode in
> >>>the near future.
> >>
> >>Of course, hypertext links are only one way of locating a piece of
> >>information you've already identified as desirable, and they don't help if
> >>you're not already reading a paper that has such links. But I'm curious as
> >>to how publishers can be seen as now having "control of the directed-search
> >>mode." Do you mean merely that publishers control access to the information
> >>they publish? If so, how will the availability of hypertext links force
> >>publishers to give up this control? They would still have to agree to let
> >>their documents be linked.
> >
> >Why would anyone need permission to link articles? If my library
> subscribes to two related titles and they are stored on the library's
> server, why couldn't we implement links--perhaps ones that are identified by
> subject specialists within the library (or the campus) or by activating
> links authors inserted in their articles?
> >>
> >>>The old mind-set was to deny access to non-subscribers. The
> >>>new attitude would be that subscribers receive guides and
> >>>aids to finding material which is in principle freely
> >>>available, but in fact is buried in an avalanche of other
> >>>information.
> >>
> >>The most useful aspect of this idea, it seems to me, is that it recognizes
> >>that organizing, storing, locating, and retrieving information are services
> >>for which one can reasonably be expected to pay. But these seem to be
> >>services that librarians already provide; publishers don't do this. This
> >>seems to be asking publishers and librarians to switch jobs.
> >
> >No, certainly not. Librarians would continue to do what they do best,
> including providing cost-free access to information (now its electronic, in
> addition to the other formats). Publishers would continue to provide their
> services, including specialized publications for their paid subscribers.
> >>
> >>>There is another "product" which is nearly invisible but
> >>>very important. This is quality control through editors and
> >>>peer review. There is nothing that intrinsically ties this
> >>>to traditional publishers, but that is where it is currently
> >>>located and where the track record is. It is been painfully
> >>>lacking in most areas of the electronic network.
> >>
> >>Yes, and in the realm of electronic publishing there is a distressing
> >>tendency to underestimate the importance of editing for content *as well
> >>as* copy editing. If there is indeed an "information explosion" going on,
> >>then copy editing and design (which will soon enough have its application
> >>in e-publishing) should become even more important as scholars and other
> >>users need to digest more and more information. Good copy editing and
> >>design is what makes the process of reading and understanding easier.
> >>
> >>
> >>>Archives cost money, so
> >>>one maintained by a commercial publisher would almost
> >>>certainly have to be revenue-producing. But
> >>>revenue-producing archives are problematic in many ways, and
> >>>will probably fare poorly in competition with free,
> >>>non-commercial journals and preprint databases. They will
> >>>also interact awkwardly with the navigation and retrieval
> >>>tools coming into use.
> >>
> >>How do you know?
> >
> >Awkward in that a search may result in several hits and she would have
> immediate access only to the free articles but would have to determine if
> the unseen articles were worth paying for--considering what is known about
> the content and the delay that may be cause during the money transactions.
> >>
> >>>Part of the mission of a research library is to archive
> >>>material and make it freely available to its users.
> >>>Supporting journal archives would be a direct contribution
> >>>to this mission.
> >>
> >>But let's not fall into the trap of thinking that the libraries provide
> >>this service "for free" just because they don't charge fees to individual
> >>users. The storing, cataloging, finding, retriving skills I mentioned
> >>above are indeed bought from librarians: they are paid for by taxes,
> >>student fees, and so on. If a library is supporting an archive for
> >>journals or any other text, you can bet your next paycheck they're going to
> >>recover their costs for establishing and supporting that archive.
> >
> >Yes, there is no free lunch. However, we are measuring success in terms of
> the numbers of searches and retrievals. Of course, some say that cost
> recovery (at least) may be necessary some day. so, one possibility may be
> to for the library to seek reimbursement from those who are making money on
...
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 08:55:29 EDT
Reply-To: "Michael R. Boudreau"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "Michael R. Boudreau"
Subject: Re: VT Model
>>Why would anyone need permission to link articles? If my library
>subscribes to two related titles and they are stored on the library's
>server, why couldn't we implement links--perhaps ones that are identified by
>subject specialists within the library (or the campus) or by activating
>links authors inserted in their articles?
Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant that publishers would still have to grant
permission for their publications to be stored in an archive from which
they could be accessed directly or by links.
>>>>Publishers
>>>>cannot support copy editing of files for a free archive
>>>>because editing is expensive and the costs cannot be
>>>>recovered. Editing lies outside the expertise and mission
>>>>of the library, so the library cannot support it either.
>>>
>>>Then the solution is to find a way to recover the costs of copy editing,
>>>not to dispense with it.
>>
>>Why? Many of us would rather read ASCII for free than to pay for a nice
>layout (e.g., two columns, varied fonts, etc.).
You're confusing copyediting and design. I would not fuss too much about
having to read ASCII text if it were clear, concise, easy to follow, and at
least occasionally lively--all the qualities that good copyediting helps to
bring to an article. I could read through one murky, wordy, awkward,
poorly organized article if I really had to; but if I needed to get through
a large collection, I'd start to feel pretty good about paying for
readability.
And let's not underestimate the importance of good design. A "nice layout"
may sound like a mere luxury--until you have to sit in front of the
computer and read a few hundred K worth of plain ASCII text. I'd like to
see publishers and libraries cooperate to find ways to make documents not
only accessible electronically, but easy on the brain and the eyes as well.
>>>>editors should
>>>>continue to request rewriting to improve useability.
>>>
>>>They can request it all they want; some authors are incapable of providing
>>>it.
>>
>>Perhaps the authors should pay for it then.
I'm all for that.
>>>How many bad articles are you willing to read just because
>>>they're free?
>>
>>Are they "bad articles" because they are not pleasingly displayed? I think
>I missed your point here.
Bad because poorly written. See? I need to hire a copy editor just for my
postings to this list...
--Mike Boudreau
University of Illinois Press
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 08:13:36 EDT
Reply-To: "Michael R. Boudreau"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "Michael R. Boudreau"
Subject: online document formatting
Judith Gresham writes:
> I accepted a position to produce a newletter for a new organization,
>and found the newsletter was to be distributed soley through e-mail. The
>mix of services used by the members precludes attaching files to some.
>This means the newletter must be pure ASCII and self-contained within the
>e-mail message. I find I have to rethink my presentation.
> While one would think that scholarly journals are content-oriented and
>not subject to the above problems, one must remember that tables of data
>are included that extend beyond an 80-column limitation. Some may
>include illustrations. I have found some on-line documents that merely
>delete the tables.
> Unfortunately, one must plan for the lowest common denominator and/or
>devise alternative delivery systems for tables and illustrations.
Are you familiar with Adobe Acrobat software? In brief, this allows you to
create a fully formatted document which is saved as a 7-bit ASCII file (and
hence transferable via email) and which can be viewed and printed by anyone
who has the viewing application, even though they don't have the
originating application (or the original fonts).
I've been testing the software on books and journals we produce, and I
wonder if anyone has any experience actually distributing Acrobat files.
--Mike Boudreau
University of Illinois Press
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 08:14:04 EDT
Reply-To: "J. KENNEDY"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "J. KENNEDY"
Subject: Electronic publication
Text item: Text_1
I have a project to electronically publish a book that the WHO
currently publishes in hard copy. The publication contains
information that is stored in a database. In years past, the
information within the database has been exported into a document
processor and the book has been crafted from this "exported" data.
Now, we would like to electronically produce this publication. What
this means specifically, is that we would like to marry a database
search engine with a text display package (perhaps like what is
currently available with CD-based encyclopedias, etc.) However,
unlike a encyclopedia, where the search engine searches amoungst the
text of the document, we want the search engine to search the database
files. Results of the user queries would be presented in a menu or
roster format. The user could then choose an item from the list and
display the associated text page.
Questions:
Are there any pre-written packages that accomplish this task?
If so, what are they?
Initially, this document would be distributed on diskettes, though
there should be no barrier to eventually distributing on CD-ROM or
even on the WWW. Are there any front-ends that work across these
platforms?
All replies gratefully appreciated.
Thanks,
John Kennedy
World Health Organization
Geneva, Switzerland.
kennedyj@who.ch
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 08:15:54 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Electronic Editorial Office Costs
Three responses to Andrew Odlyzko's Questionnaire about Electronic
Editorial Costs follow below. -- S.H.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 94 08:34:56 EDT
From: Janet Fisher
Subject: Editorial Costs
To: Andrew Odlyzko
Cc: Stevan Harnad
Thanks for sending me a copy of your questions about editorial
payments. I agree with Stevan's description of the process that an
editor (and support staff) go through to review papers. Yes, it is
common for publishers to pay a portion or all of the expenses of the
editorial office. In the humanities this is less the case, but it
varies tremendously depending on the editor, the editor's institution,
and the competition for the journal. When publishers compete for a
journal, this is where the deal can either be made or broken. These
costs have increased dramatically for a large percentage of our
journals in the last five years due to tightening funds at
universities. We now have editors wanting us to buy them computer
equipment and software, editorial tracking packages, etc.
In addition to editorial office support, some editors do indeed receive
royalties (in our case, usually after the journal has reached a
break-even position and the Press has recovered its initial deficits).
Or the bottom line can be split with the editor and/or the editor's
institution (if they own the journal). Also, we usually return 50% of
subsidiary rights income to the editorial office. Patricia Scarry (U of
Chicago Press) and Jill O'Neill (Elsevier) gave a presentation on
editorial office costs at the last Charleston Conference. You could
contact them for copies of their presentations: Patricia at phone
312-702-7359; Jill at phone 212-633-3754.
I would be happy to provide more detailed numbers -- with the journal
identities hidden, of course -- and percentages of total costs, if you
wish. But I probably cannot do this before the end of August because of
previous commitments and a 10-day trip coming up. Let me know what you
would like and I'll see what I can do. We have a diverse list of
journals in disciplines from humanities to social sciences to computer
and cognitive science, and an extremely wide range of financial
arrangements.
The other point I would make is that most journal editors accept
between 25% and 35% of the papers actually received. Possibly 10% are
rejected outright, but the rest of the rejected do go through the
review process and possibly through a revision stage also. These take
up the time of the editor and the editor's staff also, and this time
has to be paid for too. Only in a very few fields (like economics)
are submission charges common.
Note from S.H.: The acceptance rate varies greatly from discipline
to discipline. The acceptance rate in physics and mathematics is
more like 75-80% and author page charges are less uncommon there.
CICCHETTI DV. THE RELIABILITY OF PEER REVIEW FOR MANUSCRIPT AND
GRANT SUBMISSIONS - A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY INVESTIGATION. BEHAVIORAL
AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 1991 MAR, V14 N1:119-134.
HARGENS LL. VARIATION IN JOURNAL PEER REVIEW SYSTEMS - POSSIBLE
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. JAMA-JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL
ASSOCIATION, 1990 MAR 9, V263 N10:1348-1352.
ROBERTS J. NSF RETHINKS ITS PROPOSAL TO REVISE PAGE-CHARGE RULES.
NATURE, 1993 MAR 4, V362 N6415:7-7.
CHANGE - TO VOLUNTARY PAGE CHARGES. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
RELIABILITY, 1992 SEP, V41 N3:327-327.
Most of our editors have at least a half-time assistant to handle the
clerical parts of the editorial tasks (acknowledging manuscripts,
contacting potential reviewers, sending manuscripts out for review,
dogging reviewers, writing authors, etc.), and if the assistant is a
"managing editor type" and also does copyediting, this is more likely a
full-time position. These costs can be anywhere from $12,000 to $30,000
per year just for that staff position.(Not including equipment, phone,
fax, postage, office space, university overhead [yes, really!] that
universities often try to recuperate.)
Editorial board members are usually not paid, but this doesn't mean
that Editors are not. A few of our journals given token payments to
Associate Editors (the usually three top people under the editor) but
not to editorial board members. The fact that you have been a member of
the editorial board of 18 journals and never been paid is consistent
with our experience. But you cannot conclude from that fact that
editors are not paid and editorial offices are not paid for by the
journal or publisher.
I would also argue that there will still be some "typesetting" cost
with electronic journals. I do not believe that authors -- even in the
most highly sophisticated fields -- will ever do all the formatting
required to take manuscripts directly without some intervention.
"Typesetting" will really become formatting, I guess, but there are
costs associated with this. We should know more about what these are
once _Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science_ begins
publication.
I guess that's all for now. Let me know what editorial costs you are
interested in and if you have questions -- or disagree- ments -- over
anything in this message.
JANET H. FISHER PHONE (617) 253-2864
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR FOR JOURNALS PUBLISHING
MIT PRESS, 55 HAYWARD STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MA 02142
FISHER@MITVMA.MIT.EDU FAX (617) 258-6779
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 94 12:51:25 EDT
From: VMONTY@VM2.YorkU.CA (Vivienne Monty)
Hi: I shall look for harder data but in Library Science and History,
two fields that I am familiar with, I have never known a scholar/editor
to be directly paid. It is mostly in terms of release time or such
renumeration that I have known. Even these release time arrangements
are hard to get now in Canada at least.
Often the scholar/editor however has a "bureaucracy" to call on at the
Association sponsoring the journal or the publisher who take care of
the day to day administrative operations. The key word is often and NOT
always however.
As stated earlier in your discussions, the world of academe "sponsor"
academic publishing to a large degree through the granting release
time, research leaves and the personal time of scholars. Universities
have a tremendous Dollar value investment in editorships, writing etc
whether some realize it or not. And some count such time as zero.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 94 13:02 CDT
From: Jack P Hailman
Subject: Re: Odlyzko Editorial Survey
Things might be changing on the subject of paid editorships, at least my
own views have changed. I served as editor of Animal Behaviour for
three years (or was it five?), and never again would I devote that much
of my life uncompensated. I wonder if other former editors of major
international journals feel the same way?
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:44:27 EDT
Reply-To: Samuel Richter
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Samuel Richter
Subject: Re: online document formatting
>>Judith Gresham writes:
>>
>>> I accepted a position to produce a newletter for a new organization,
>>>and found the newsletter was to be distributed soley through e-mail. The
>>>mix of services used by the members precludes attaching files to some.
>>>This means the newletter must be pure ASCII and self-contained within the
>>>e-mail message. I find I have to rethink my presentation.
>>> While one would think that scholarly journals are content-oriented and
>>>not subject to the above problems, one must remember that tables of data
>>>are included that extend beyond an 80-column limitation. Some may
>>>include illustrations. I have found some on-line documents that merely
>>>delete the tables.
>>> Unfortunately, one must plan for the lowest common denominator and/or
>>>devise alternative delivery systems for tables and illustrations.
There is also the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard
which some mailers support. Some people often think it means Multimedia
Internet Mail Extension, but that's understandable since it allows you
to send almost any kind of data through the mail, including audio and
video. What this means is, you can use the existing software you have
to create figures, tables, etc and embed them in a MIME message.
See RFC (Request For Comment) #1341 (available by ftp from ftp.uu.net under
/pub/rfc, I think) for the MIME specification. As far as mailer programs go,
I think PINE is MIME-compliant (and free).
>>Are you familiar with Adobe Acrobat software? In brief, this allows you to
>>create a fully formatted document which is saved as a 7-bit ASCII file (and
>>hence transferable via email) and which can be viewed and printed by anyone
>>who has the viewing application, even though they don't have the
>>originating application (or the original fonts).
>>
>>I've been testing the software on books and journals we produce, and I
>>wonder if anyone has any experience actually distributing Acrobat files.
>>
>>--Mike Boudreau
>>University of Illinois Press
>>
I have currently finished a prototype on-line journal delivery system
using Mosaic and WAIS and all I can say is thank God for Acrobat.
We typeset journals and each journal article is a postscript file usually
about 2-3+ megabytes in size. After distilling, we get a PDF file
of about 150-300k -- the size of a medium-large bitmap. I don't think
electronic distribution of PostScript files would be capable without it.
Sa///xr
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:46:14 EDT
Reply-To: "Dieke van Wijnen (Tel 078 334 264)"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "Dieke van Wijnen (Tel 078 334 264)"
Subject: Re: online document formatting
In-Reply-To: <"4532 Tue Aug 2 14:20:49 1994"@relay.surfnet.nl>
Dear Mr. Boudreau,
In response to your question re: distribution of Acrobat files, the CAJUN
project (John Wiley & Sons and the Dept. of Computer Science at the
University of Nottingham (Professor David Brailsford)) is doing this with
the journal Electronic Publishing, Dissemintaion and Design.
For info: circus@cs.nott.ac.uk
Dieke van Wijnen
Wolters Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands
> Are you familiar with Adobe Acrobat software? In brief, this allows you to
> create a fully formatted document which is saved as a 7-bit ASCII file (and
> hence transferable via email) and which can be viewed and printed by anyone
> who has the viewing application, even though they don't have the
> originating application (or the original fonts).
>
> I've been testing the software on books and journals we produce, and I
> wonder if anyone has any experience actually distributing Acrobat files.
>
> --Mike Boudreau
> University of Illinois Press
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:48:13 EDT
Reply-To: RUSSELLB@ext23.oes.orst.edu
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: RUSSELLB@ext23.oes.orst.edu
Subject: (Forwarded) Re: VT Model
Forwarded message:
From: Self
To: "Michael R. Boudreau"
Subject: Re: VT Model
Date: 1 Aug 94 23:58:14
Hey folks: you talk about nice layout etc in a mess like this:
---------inserted clip
>>>
>>>Then the solution is to find a way to recover the costs of copy
editing,
>>>not to dispense with it.
>>
>>Why? Many of us would rather read ASCII for free than to pay for a
nice
>layout (e.g., two columns, varied fonts, etc.).
You're confusing copyediting and design. I would not fuss too much
about
having to read ASCII text if it were clear, concise, easy to follow,
and at
least occasionally lively--all the qualities that good copyediting
helps to
bring to an article. I could read through one murky, wordy, awkward,
poorly organized article if I really had to; but if I needed to get
through
a large collection, I'd start to feel pretty good about paying for
readability.
And let's not underestimate the importance of good design. A "nice
layout"
may sound like a mere luxury--until you have to sit in front of the
computer and read a few hundred K worth of plain ASCII text. I'd
like to
see publishers and libraries cooperate to find ways to make documents
not
only accessible electronically, but easy on the brain and the eyes as
well.
>>>>editors should
>>>>continue to request rewriting to improve useability.
>>>
>>>They can request it all they want; some authors are incapable of
providing
>>>it.
>>
-----------end of inserted clip
Who can figure out who said >> and who said >>>>. Good grief!!!
;-(
Bill Russell :-)
internet: russellb@ext23.oes.orst.edu
vox: 503-347-3683 fax: 503-347-6303
snail mail: 775 Tenth St. S.E.
Bandon, OR 97411-9108
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:49:05 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Re: Electronic Editorial Office Costs
From: amo@research.att.com (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 94 06:07 EDT
> I cannot speak about physics with any confidence, but the acceptance
> rate for a typical journal in mathematics is usually considerably
> lower than 75-80%. Judging from my own experience in serving on
> a variety of editorial boards, I would estimate that rate is perhaps
> around 50%. The rate of acceptance to all the journals in mathematics
> is higher, and might easily approach 75%. If a paper is rejected
> because of a serious mistake, or else because the results had been
> published previously, then that usually ends the matter. However,
> when a paper is rejected because of the much more subjective judgement
> that it is not of sufficient quality, the author typically submits
> it to another journal.
It would be extremely useful to get exact figures across disciplines.
Apart from the social science acceptance rates (25%) cited by Janet
Fisher and the physical science rates (75% in physics, perhaps 50% in
math), there are the biomedical sciences (low acceptance rates), the
humanities (probably varied), and interdisciplinary journals (Science,
Nature, etc.) with very low rates. And the acceptance rates probably
rise as one descends in the prestige hierarchy (except where
self-selection keeps submissions to prestigous journals at a high level
of likely acceptability, as in the top physics journals). All these
data would be useful to have. The articles I cited (Cichetti, Hargens)
report some of it.
> In evaluating the costs of running a journal, it is the 50% acceptance
> rate that is the significant one, not the 75% rate. The work involved
> in handling a rejected manuscript is usually comparable to that of an
> accepted one.
I agree completely. And another figure that needs to be calculated
field by field is the ULTIMATE (cross-journal) acceptance rate: It is
my belief that in one form or other, just about EVERYTHING gets
published eventually, if the author is persistent enough, even if it's
in the unrefereed vanity press. Having approximately the same
manuscript refereed repeatedly for different journals is a drain on
resources, but I'm not sure how to get around it: the prestige
hierarchy is based in part on (intellectual) competition.
> The other remark is that page charges have essentially disappeared
> in mathematics. They have been bringing in less and less revenue,
> and the American Matehmatical Society, for one, has eliminated them
> completely.
This has to be re-thought. Page charges made little sense in paper
publication, since the publisher needed to take copyright and charge
subscribers anyway. Author page charges were usually just a voluntary
supplement, sometimes offered as a way of speeding publication. But in
the electronic medium, where total page costs would be so much lower
(75% lower) and reader access would be so rapid, global and free, it
should be re-thought whether it would not in fact be to EVERYONE's
benefit (especially the author's) if the requisite advance subsidy to
cover the FULL minimal costs per electronic "page" came from a
combination of learned society, university, library, and
author-publication-grant sources.
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: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:49:29 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Acceptance Rates
From: Ann Okerson
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 12:19:03 -0400 (EDT)
Rates of Acceptance:
There is not a great deal of real data published about this particular
question. There are a lot of general, informal speculations and
assertions. The acceptance rates for individual journals are certainly
*not* the same as the overall acceptance rates across *all* journals in
a field.
According to a presentation I heard a couple of years ago from the
Editor of the PMLA, a major journal in the modern languages area
published by the Modern Languages Association, the rejection rate for
PMLA is in the low 90% range. The journal is relatively small, highly
prestigious, and has not grown commensurately in physical size with the
growth in the size of the literature of the field. The editorial board
works diligently to select the small proportion of submitted articles
that can be published, but the Editor-in-Chief affirmed that "much" of
the work that is rejected is of high calibre, and "the great majority"
of it ends up published elsewhere, often in more specialized journals.
He presented no data beyond that.
According to figures from Louis Addis, formerly Librarian at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator, slightly over 70% of the high energy
physics preprints that are accessible via SLAC's major database of same,
are eventually published somewhere in the print physics literature.
That is, the finished products are recognizably close to the original
preprint and thus the librarians can indicate with the preprint record
that the work has appeared in Journal XYZ with a standard citation to it
in its "finished" form.
In attendance at many, many meetings of societies, publishers, and
libraries on the topic of scholarly journals and communication, I have
heard many generalizations about the rejection and acceptance rates
in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Yet in each of these
broad areas, the range of acceptance/rejection across journals must
be very, very great, for the "averages" rarely resemble the specific
data quoted for any individual title, such as the PMLA.
Absent real data, this suggests that one should be careful of making
generalizations. What does seem true is that a great majority of work
is eventually published somewhere. In high energy physics, we know it's
close to at least 3/4 of all submissions. I've always thought that
passing an article through two or three or more editor's or publisher's
hands wastes some of the time of the system overall. (Note that this
competitive process is also the way that book submissions, particularly
in the trade market, work and the mechanism by which work is rewritten,
revised, and improved.) I hope, possibly naively, that some of the
current duplication of editorial and reviewing effort can be reduced as
the process of scholarly communication is more and more electronically
supported.
Ann Okerson/ARL
ann@cni.org
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 10:52:53 EDT
Reply-To: James Powell
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: James Powell
Subject: Pardon the interruption...
Just a housekeeping note:
I have received several angry messages recently from individuals who have for
various reasons lost control of their subscription to VPIEJ-L and feel that I
am not speedy enough in fixing their problem. I feel it is time to once again
remind everyone that it is your responsibility to keep track of the lists you
subscribe to, their specific commands, and what userid you used to subscribe
to a particular list. If you know your userid is about to change, unsubscribe
from all listserv lists under the old userid and resubscribe under the new
id. I maintain this list in my SPARE time, as often as not from home in the
evenings and I prioritize requests. Requests to fix userid problems are at
the bottom of my list. Moderating the list is top priority. So please, please
keep a list of your subscriptions and a copy of the welcome message sent by
listserv.
Thanks.
James Powell ... Library Automation, University Libraries, VPI&SU
1-4986 ... JPOWELL@VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU
... jpowell@borg.lib.vt.edu - NeXTMail welcome here
... Owner of VPIEJ-L, a discussion list for Electronic Journals
Archives: http://borg.lib.vt.edu:80/ gopher://oldborg.lib.vt.edu:70/
file://borg.lib.vt.edu/~ftp
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 08:15:17 EDT
Reply-To: mark@csc.albany.edu
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: mark@csc.albany.edu
Subject: VT model
I wonder about the efficacy of using a print journal to distribute
summaries.
It would be much better to have summaries in a WWW archive, so they can
be linked with the complete text.
In fact, it would be even better to have an archive consisting of
abstracts/summaries from _different_ electronic journals. They could
be catalogued by subject matter, as is done for reviews by Math Reviews.
People could browse the abstracts in their areas of interest and
immediately get any articles they find valuable.
The summaries could also be linked to reviews as they became available.
As far as the complete texts are concerned, they would be considerably
more useful, I think, if they were word processed according to style
designs common to all papers from a particular journal. These papers
will be around for a considerable length of time, and should be dressed
up in an appealing manner.
In fields where there is no consensus on word processing technology,
postscript versions could be provided.
For people with graphical interfaces, postscript and some other processed
media can be browsed on line. For others, they can be fetched and printed.
If there is a perceived need in a given field, ascii versions could be
provided for browsing via non-graphical connections. Nevertheless, a processed
version should be available for printing.
At the New York Journal of Mathematics, we provide papers in .dvi format,
as this format has become the standard one in mathematics. Generated by
TeX, the documents are made via custom style files which encode the
typesetting design. This permits our journal to provide quality
control for the typesetting of our papers at relatively low overhead.
Presumably, similar design specifications can be standardized in other
word processing systems.
Sincerely,
Mark Steinberger
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Steinberger | Editor in Chief, New York Journal of Mathematics
Dept. of Math. & Stat |
SUNY at Albany | http://nyjm.albany.edu:8000/nyjm.html
Albany, NY 12222 | gopher nyjm.albany.edu 1070
mark@sarah.albany.edu | ftp to nyjm.albany.edu in /pub/nyjm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 08:17:47 EDT
Reply-To: Barry Kapke
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Barry Kapke
Organization: DharmaNet International
Subject: GASSHO: Call for Submissions
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
GASSHO, an international Buddhist electronic journal, is soliciting
submissions for future issues.
Issue Topic Deadline
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~
September/October Health & Healing August 18
November/December Human Rights, Buddhist Values October 18
January/February Dana December 16
March/April Teaching Dharma February 15
May/June Children & Family April 16
Academic papers intended for refereed consideration should be notated as
such. 1-2 refereed articles will be accepted for each issue of GASSHO and
2-3 non-refereed articles will be accepted for each issue. Book reviews,
or reviews of events, are also being solicited.
Please submit complete articles or abstracts as soon as possible. Send
your ideas or submissions to: Barry Kapke, Editor, GASSHO, PO Box 4951,
Berkeley CA 94704-4951, or e-mail to dharma@netcom.com. Electronic
submissions are preferred to hardcopy.
Sample copies of GASSHO may be retrieved via anonymous ftp at
ftp.netcom.com in the subdirectory /pub/dharma/Gassho/ as well as by
gopher or ftp to etext.archive.umich.edu or coombs.anu.edu.au
--
Barry Kapke, Director | "All that we are | INTERNET: dharma@netcom.com
DharmaNet International | is the result of | WWW: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/
P.O. Box 4951 | what we have thought." | pub/dharma/defa-home.html
Berkeley, CA 94704-4951 | (BUDDHA) | DIAL-UP BBS: (510) 836-4717
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 08:36:58 EDT
Reply-To: "Todd A. Jacobs"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "Todd A. Jacobs"
Organization: Jacobs Publishing, LTD
Subject: ADP Supports Writers
ASSOCIATION OF DIGITAL PUBLISHERS
6052 Wilmington Pike #161
Dayton, Ohio 45459-7006
ADP Supports Authors
Membership Offers Protection to Writers
For Immediate Release
Friday, August 05, 1994
Contact: Todd A. Jacobs
Association of Digital Publishers
202-388-9742
Dayton, Ohio--A little-known provision of the Association of Digital
Publishers Quality Assurance Criteria came under scrutiny this week by
the Board of Directors. The Criteria are standards which all ADP
members are required to follow as a condition of membership. The
provision in question discusses contractual obligations.
One of the main concerns of authors and their agents remains the
book publishing contract. In many cases, traditional publishing
contracts are not designed to accommodate electronic publishing. As a
result, many authors are unsure whether they are safe in accepting
electronic publishing contracts. The Board met to determine whether
its charter allowed it to intercede on an author's behalf to ensure
fair treatment.
The Board of Directors examined all relevent guidelines, and
concluded that it is within its purview to hear grievances filed by
authors against member publishers. "You don't have to be a member to
file a grievance. We feel that offering certain mediation and
arbitration services is in the public interest," said ADP Chairman
Todd Jacobs. "However, we also offer educational services to our
publishers and member writers which we hope will obviate the
necessity."
The assurance that the ADP will assist authors in receiving fair
treatment from member publishers is an encouraging sign to writers
interested in electronic publishing. The author is the very heart of
the publishing industry, and the ADP is continually taking pro-active
steps to make electronic publishing an attractive alternative for the
contemporary writer.
# # #
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 08:37:20 EDT
Reply-To: David Farmer
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: David Farmer
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
Subject: Re: ADP Supports Writers
In article <31tgre$3l7@clarknet.clark.net> tjacobs@clark.net (Todd A. Jacobs)
writes:
>
> ADP Supports Authors
>
> Membership Offers Protection to Writers
>
>Publishers Quality Assurance Criteria came under scrutiny this week by
>the Board of Directors.
Who are the members of this ``Board of Directors'' and what are
their credentials?
It would be unfortunate if your failure to provide this basic
information resulted in people thinking there is something fishy
about your organization.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 1994 08:37:01 EDT
Reply-To: calvin@savvy.com
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: calvin@savvy.com
Organization: United States Information Corp.
Subject: Freebies & Giveaways
Just Located the Internet Financial Services Mall.
Very interesting. Freebees & Giveaways. :-)
Gopher to 'financial.savvy.com'
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:57:13 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: On Trade vs. Esoteric Publication
The following remarks by Bernard Naylor, Director, University of
Southampton Library, are followed by comments from Stevan Harnad.
The Full discussion is archived in two files in:
ftp://princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal
filenames: archive.NOW
who.payspiper
Other URLs:
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/1ftp%3aprinceton.edu%40/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Psychology/Psycoloquy.html
http://louis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy
http://192.190.21.10/wic/psych.03.html
>From: "B.Naylor"
>Date: Thu, 4 Aug 94 17:38:16 BST
A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO THE SUBVERSIVE DISCUSSION
Bernard Naylor
Director, University of Southampton Library
1. Having quite a large department to run, I've only been able to keep
one ear so far on the progress of your interesting discussions. I'm now
snatching a few moments to make a comment or two which I hope you will
find constructive.
2.1 The model which divides scholarly communication into
"trade-scholarly" and "esoteric" is conceptually tidy, but I'm not
convinced it takes full account of the actual state of affairs. While we
are locked (for the time being) into the commercial and paper mode, I
believe that journal articles can actually be described as lying at
different places on a long and seamless spectrum rather than falling
neatly into two groups. Often, the actual place where a journal is
located on the spectrum is hard to define, and it may change with time
as an article becomes hot or loses heat. Hence we have to imagine that
there will be confusion in an indeterminate, but probably large,
central area of the spectrum if the model to which you are working is
to emerge. This will be while "journals" (or, more precisely, the
communications they contain) follow through the process of being
assigned to one of the two groups. And even then, any given article may
show a tendency to migrate from the group to which it has become
assigned.
2.2 The journals of highest prestige (which are most often the ones with the
fewest apprehensions about the present financial situation for
journals) will continue to be the magnets for people who think their
work is of the highest quality and deserves the widest scholarly
attention. Hence, the division of scholarly communication into two sets
is likely to be seen as having connotations about quality of content.
(I.e. "publish trade-scholarly" equals higher quality and relevance.
"Publish esoterically" equals lower quality and relevance.)
2.3 Scholars here are already under heavy pressure from their
departments to publish in highly-rated outlets and I cannot see that
pressure easily letting up. It can have very serious financial
consequences in the UK for a department if its members don't achieve
that, because the process of awarding them money on account of their
research makes that an important criterion. I cannot imagine any
scholar readily saying to his/her head of department: "Actually, my
work is of relatively low scholarly quality and relevance so I do not
propose to try to get it published in any of the journals which our
profession ranks highest" - even though, in practice, that may be where
it will end up.
2.4 Money is also relevant here. I doubt whether a discussion about the
altruism of the members of academe would get us very far. I just think
that any scholar who observes that he could get some money for
something he publishes as well as transmitting his ideas is quite
likely to be attracted by that possibility. The attraction of that will
become even stronger if he perceives someone else (e.g. an information
broker) making money out of something he (the scholar) has made
available free. It could be argued that the activities of the
information broker should be stopped, but I think that would break down
because for some people information brokers provide a very useful
service, enabling them to use their own time in other, more productive
ways.
2.5 I therefore think that the possibility I raise in my "Future of the
Journal" paper, namely that the electronic (and esoteric) sector could
feature for some time as the sink for the material of lesser quality,
could quite likely emerge.
3.1 I've found the debate about where the costs of publication really
lie very interesting. It may turn out to be true that the "ordinary"
publishers are exaggerating the costs which the network will not
substitute, by a factor of about three (their "over 70 per cent", as
against your "less than 25 per cent"). If it does, I shall be a bit
surprised since most of them depend, for earning their living, on being
more or less right about that kind of thing.
3.2 I think one reason for their caution about electronic substitution
is because they find speculation about alternative cost-recovery models
very complex and difficult. But one of the two main purposes of
substitution is to address a perceived economic problem - the other
being to introduce one further industry to the IT revolution. The road
from yesterday contains enough litter from high-tech disaster projects
to suggest some caution, at least, on the economic/costing front.
Remember; the conclusions reached are for testing in settings where red
faces are the least of the penalties for being proved wrong.
4.1 On the question of technology, I am reasonably confident that I
have not come across any technological problems which I don't think can
be solved. There are still important questions as to: how soon? and by
whom? and at what cost? At present, the "information superhighway"
itself does not exist internationally in a form which could cope with
the information traffic currently carried (not very efficiently) by
print on paper (the "fat pipe" under the Atlantic at 1.5 Mbps is surely
hopelessly inadequate?) and the other problems I referred to in my
paper are also with us and have to be resolved if an electronic
solution is to operate satisfactorily. Print on paper is currently
carrying a colossal amount of information into all sorts of unlikely
academic places.
4.2 An important additional consideration on this point, in my view, is
what I might call "the mental preparation of the sector". The academic
sector, in my view, has been right to point to the serious mistakes
made in some industries where technological advance has been implanted
without adequate preparation of the work force, in the form of
reorientation of work processes and training of working people. We are
now seriously contemplating the most dramatic change in the working
habits of scholars for some centuries, but I look in vain for
convincing signs that our sector appreciates this and is collectively
bending its mind to preparing for the consequences. There is far too
much "Throw the technology at them and they'll get on with it". A
change of this magnitude is going to cause confusion and muddle anyway
for a time, but we ought to be doing far more to minimise that. Our
present approach, in my view, is asking for trouble. One of the biggest
drags on the introduction of advanced technology solutions lies in the
attitude of the people for whom we consider them to be intended. It's
crucial that a much better effort is directed to changing that. When I
had to cancel some physics journals a few months ago, our physicists
gave me the impression that I was bringing the roof down on their
department, and Paul Ginsparg wasn't mentioned once in their
remonstrations - though I've no doubt they're well aware of what he's
doing.
4.3 I recently asked a group of about twenty chief university
librarians (that is, about 20 per cent of the total UK cohort) "by what
date do you expect your present number of current subscriptions to
print-on-paper journals will have been reduced by 80 per cent". The
extremes were "1995" and "2050" with 2010 by far the favourite
prediction (2010 was mine as well - honestly). (I said I thought that
might be a way, for some of them, of saying "after I've retired".)
There is some belief out there that the present system will collapse
and change suddenly quite soon but it's not very widespread - though it
may be right. Otherwise, it implies that Southampton University Library
must shed 300 print journals every year from now till 2010. At present,
that does not look very likely and this means the process will have to
accelerate substantially (and I expect it will) later in the period.
4.4 Rereading some of what you and Andrew have written makes me wonder
whether we are really that far apart. My job is to cope with today's
reality (which is largely, like it or not, both papyrocentric and
commercial) and try to anticipate the next few years' (say, five or at
most ten) changes reasonably intelligently. You and Andrew appear to be
speculating about a revolution which I am satisfied will come - though
I seriously doubt your present economic assumptions - and I sometimes
get the impression that Andrew might not disagree strongly with my
speculation and the speculation of my librarian colleagues as to the
time scale. I'm less sure, Stevan, about your views as to likely time
scales.
5.1 One of the points I'm trying to underline in pointing out that
journal publishing is an industry is that it will not sit quietly by
and let itself be subverted. We must assume that, if a concerted plan
emerges to cut major traditional publishers out from the knowledge
communication business, they will fight very strongly for their "share
of the action". Commercial publishers will have revenue streams to
defend, not least in the interest of the people they employ and of
their shareholders, and even learned societies and academic presses
could face massive upheaval if revenue-earning titles (which are also
circulated gratis to some as a privilege of membership) appear to be in
danger of complete substitution, and they will fight to prevent that.
5.2 One of the main points that publishers are likely to raise in this
country, and probably in Western Europe generally, will be to question
(to put it no more strongly) the propriety of academic institutions
using public money (all UK universities bar one very small one are
funded by the taxpayer) in order to drive a viable industry (as they
see it) to the wall. Perhaps the government will be happy to see the
publishers as resembling the toll bridge owners of past centuries whose
bizarre privileges were bought out or set aside with the growth of the
road network. But the mood in the UK, even among universities
themselves, is to press for more and more activities to go down the
"charging" road. Our government believes passionately in markets - I
think it claims it got its predilection for them from the United
States! - and I can see it saying: "You must allow commercial academic
publishers onto the academic superhighway on terms which allow them to
compete fairly for the survival of their role". I don't think this
necessarily means that it should always be carried out in the same way
as now - but they must be given a reasonable chance to adapt. I'm
genuinely surprised that you appear to think that it will be
politically acceptable in the United States to make most scholarly
information a non-tradeable commodity. I don't think it will be here.
6. Maybe these few remarks have irrevocably confirmed my typecast for
you! They are among the reasons why I think evolution is a better mode
than revolution and why I think that the economic problems which
libraries and others face in the scholarly communication field are
unlikely to be resolved by an agreement that it should all be for free
in an electronic setting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments by S. Harnad:
> 2.1 The model which divides scholarly communication into
> "trade-scholarly" and "esoteric" is conceptually tidy, but I'm not
> convinced it takes full acount of the actual state of affairs... I
> believe that journal articles can actually be described as lying at
> different places on a long and seamless spectrum rather than falling
> neatly into two groups... there will be confusion in an indeterminate,
> but probably large, central area of the spectrum...
There is indeed a continuum from trade (scholarly) publishing to
esoteric (scholarly) publishing, but the lion's share of the kind of
periodical publication that I and most publishing scholars and
scientists are concerned with falls quite safely within the
unequivocally esoteric region of that continuum. The gray area is not
at issue, nor is it an issue.
At the root of our disagreement is your identification of the factors
you apparently think determine a journal's place in the continuum. You
think they have to do with the prestige of the journal, whereas I think
they are much bigger factors than that, and that they eclipse the
relatively trivial differences between high and low prestige esoteric
journals (they're ALL esoteric, compared to journals whose individual
articles actually have a nontrivial readership size). More below.
> 2.2 The journals of highest prestige (which are most often the ones with
> the fewest apprehensions about the present financial situation for
> journals) will continue to be the magnets for people who think their
> work is of the highest quality and deserves the widest scholarly
> attention. Hence, the division of scholarly communication into two sets
> is likely to be seen as having connotations about quality of content.
> (I.e. "publish trade-scholarly" equals higher quality and relevance.
> "Publish esoterically" equals lower quality and relevance.)
Here is the root of our disagreement. Of course the highest prestige
journals are the ones with the fewest financial worries (because they
are the last ones likely to be cut from library budgets), and, by
definition, they are also the ones that authors and readers value the
most highly. But this has NOTHING to do with the trade/esoteric
continuum! The high prestige journals, like their lowlier cousins are
ALL esoteric if one takes the proper measure of esotericism. This
proper measure is NOT:
(1) how much a journal costs,
(2) how many libraries subscribe to the journal,
or
(3) how likely libraries are to drop the journal.
Nor is it:
(4) how eager authors are to publish in the journal,
or
(5) how heavily publications in the journal weigh with promotions
committee.
It is not even:
(6) how much weight readers assign to articles in that journal,
(7) how many individual subscribers there are to that journal,
or even
(8) how many readers browse that journal.
We are closer, but not quite there yet, with:
(9) how many readers READ a particular article in that journal
and even closer with
(10) how many readers CITE that article.
But even with the last two measures, the relevant comparison is not
between the more and less prestigious journals in a given field (it is
a foregone conclusion that prestige will correlate positively with (9)
and (10)). What one must look at is the average readership per article
in relation to the true cost of producing that article. An even more
dramatic way to depict it would be as the RATIO OF THE PER-PAGE
READERSHIP TO THE PER-PAGE COST. That ratio may differ a little if one
compares high- and low-prestige journals within a given field, to be
sure, but if one compares it with the ratio for pages that really DO
have a market -- either popular scientific and general intellectual
periodicals or the magazine market in general (with or without
adjusting for the contribution of advertising revenues, wherever they kick
in), then the true locus of most of scholarly/scientific publication
along the trade-esoteric continuum will, I suggest, become plainly and
unequivocally apparent. And once we scale up to this broader sample of
the continuum, the relatively trivial differences between high and low
prestige journals will be altogether eclipsed.
Let's be more specific. Though it's risky to resort to figures from
hearsay (and that is all I must confess I have so far), I am confident
enough in what I am about to point out that even if I am wrong by one or
two orders of magnitude, the upshot is the same: The average published
scientific article has fewer than 10 readers and no citers; I'll bet the
same is true for the average piece of scholarship in the humanities.
You aren't speaking of average work? Alright, let's move up to the top
end of the Gaussian distribution and consider just the top 5% of the
articles in a given field: How much higher do you think those figures
are likely to be for them? (And don't forget that this excludes 95% of
what is published, and is reckoned on a per-article, not a per-journal
basis: not even the most prestigious journals produce exclusively, or
primarily, winners.)
So what are the figures for a winner likely to be? Twenty readers, two
hundred, two thousand? Suppose it's two thousand. We all know that in
paper those rare articles that generate a huge demand are supplied
mostly in the form of preprints and reprints, because a journal
certainly cannot calibrate its print run by banking on occasional
individual articles. (Journals print issues and volumes, whereas
"citation classics" are relatively rare individual papers, exceptional
by definition.)
But citation classics and the best-sellers among the separata are not
what the economies of scholarly publishing are based on. Even if we
restrict ourselves to the single journal in each academic specialty that
is by consensus the most prestigious one, the per-page readership
ratios for most of its pages will be off-scale compared to the
periodical literature that actually has a market.
Why has this never come up before? Because no matter how absurd the
per-page ratios were in scholarly periodical publication, there was
nothing anyone could do about it (and they certainly weren't going to
give up the reporting and reading of scholarly research), because the
economies of paper were such that the only way to recover the true
costs of making the research available at all was by levying
reader-access charges. Yet of course it was never the (on average less
than 10) readers who actually paid the costs per page; it was the vast
infrastructure (mainly University libraries) that was set up to
SUBSIDIZE the minuscule demand there really was for any particular page
of this esoteric (sic, I now state without trepidation) corpus. The
nonreaders (all of us) subsidized the readers (each of us) of any
particular article.
Well that is simply no longer necessary; or, rather, the subsidy can
now be set up in a much more sensible way, matching the true demand
structure and the nature of the service provided by the publisher: not
by continuing to treat a no-market commodity as if it were a viable
trade item and benightedly trying to sell it to the vanishingly small
number of scholars who may ever want to see it, but by charging the
much lower true per-page costs of esoteric publication at the point
where it is the most sensible to charge them: At the point of access to
the peer community's eyes and minds. That much more modest per-page
cost will be the price of the service that esoteric publishers perform
for AUTHORS (and their institutions and research support agencies) in
making their work available to their fellow-specialists, globally, in
perpetuum, and, of course, for free. And we will all be the better off
for it.
> 2.3 Scholars here are already under heavy pressure from their
> departments to publish in highly-rated outlets and I cannot see that
> pressure easily letting up.... I cannot imagine any
> scholar readily saying to his/her head of department: "Actually, my
> work is of relatively low scholarly quality and relevance so I do not
> propose to try to get it published in any of the journals which our
> profession ranks highest" - even though, in practice, that may be where
> it will end up.
But this point is only pertinent if one accepts your assumption that
high-prestige journal = paper (= trade)
and
low-prestige journal = electronic (= esoteric)
whereas, as I have tried to argue, I think that assumption is
incorrect. Currently ALL journals, low prestige and high, are paper.
The trade/esoteric dichotomy, as I have tried to argue above, has
nothing to do with prestige. And it will continue to have nothing to do
with it as journals become electronic; prestige will continue to depend
on the rigor of the peer review and the quality of the authors and
submissions, not on the medium.
It is true that today's high-prestige paper journals are likely to be
the last to be cancelled by libraries for economic reasons, and it may
even be true that this irrelevant side-factor will affect the initial
conditions among electronic journals (the first new ones, and the first
ones to migrate, will not be the high-prestige ones), and that will of
course be regrettable, and will retard the inevitable, for reasons that
are NOT to scholarship's advantage. But that still has nothing to do
with the trade/esoteric continuum, and hence does not provide a
rational basis for drawing conclusions about the applicability and
appropriateness of the trade model to no-market papers, whether high
prestige or low.
> 2.4 Money is also relevant here. I doubt whether a discussion about the
> altruism of the members of academe would get us very far. I just think
> that any scholar who observes that he could get some money for
> something he publishes as well as transmitting his ideas is quite
> likely to be attracted by that possibility. The attraction of that will
> become even stronger if he perceives someone else (e.g. an information
> broker) making money out of something he (the scholar) has made
> available free. It could be argued that the activities of the
> information broker should be stopped, but I think that would break down
> because for some people information brokers provide a very useful
> service, enabling them to use their own time in other, more productive
> ways.
This passage is rather complicated, and again involves some assumptions
and contingencies that I think are erroneous: First, one of the marks
of the esotericity of most of scholarly and scientific periodical
publication is that the author does NOT make a penny from the sale of
his text, and does not, and never has expected to. (It is an instant
signal that one is in the trade rather than the esoteric region of the
continuum if this is not true, and the author expects and does receive
royalties for his pages. This happens in popular and general-audience
scholarly/scientific writing. OF COURSE most of us would jump at the
opportunity to make a few bucks from publishing our words, but how
often do we get a chance to do that?) Trade publishing is
medium-independent. When there is a potential paying readership, one
can and should charge, whether on paper or on the airwaves. It's just
that this contingency is absent in the region of the continuum I am
concerned with; no author is making money there on paper, and no author
will make money there on the Net either.
So whereas I agree that scholars are not altruists -- if there were
money for them to make from the sale of their words (and if this were
not too much at odd with their scholarly mission, if any) -- then they
would certainly be happy to collect it; but the fact is that for the
overwhelming majority of the scholarly/scientific corpus there IS no
money to be made from the sale of their words -- at least not money for
THEM (the author/scholars). Money is being made, to be sure, but it is
being made exclusively by the paper periodical publisher, not the
author.
Which brings me to the second (in my view incorrect) assumption: To
show why this assumption is incorrect, I must first re-introduce what I
have come to refer to as the "Faustian Bargain" that esoteric authors
have reluctantly entered into with paper publishers -- and let me
stress that in this metaphor it is PAPER that is the devil, not paper
publishers, for they too are victims of the tyranny of the true costs
and technology of that unfortunate medium. This bargain is ONLY
Faustian in the case of esoteric publication -- publication in which
the market for most papers is virtually zero, the author does not make
a penny, and his sole motivation is to reach the eyes and minds of his
peers and posterity with his findings. To have to treat that special
transaction on the same model as the quite normal and un-Faustian
bargain between a paper publisher and an author who makes his living by
selling his words is very close to absurd, yet for centuries there was
no choice: The only hope an esoteric author had of reaching his tiny
potential non-market of peers was to allow the publisher to charge for
access to his writing, even though he would not make a penny, because
that was the only way that the expenses and a fair return could be paid
for the true and sizeable per-page costs of the technology and
logistics of paper periodical production and distribution.
To repeat: The Faustian bargain was reluctantly accepted, despite
containing an essential internal conflict of interest (between the
esoteric author's desire to reach as many interested peers as possible
and the publisher's need to restrict access with a price-tag to defray
the substantial per-page costs and a fair return for his investment and
efforts), BECAUSE THERE WAS NO OTHER CHOICE.
So if the first incorrect assumption was that esoteric authors can and
do make money from selling their articles, the second one was that their
Faustian symbiotic relationship with the paper publisher would somehow
carry over to his "information broker" counterpart in the electronic
medium. But what are we imagining here? The true per-page costs (if my
estimate is right) are now down to less than a quarter of what they were
in paper, so there is no longer a Faustian dependence on a technology
whose sizeable costs need to be recovered by blocking access to esoteric
work that already has virtually no market; the author, his institution,
library, scholarly/scientific societies and research (publication)
grants can with a little perestroika EASILY collaborate to subsidize
his life-long published page quota as needed, thereby allowing access
to his work to be free for all (as it always should have been).
So who is this "information broker"? The editor of the electronic
journal and his editorial staff (their services are already reckoned as
making up most of the remaining < 25% per-page costs)? The (unpaid)
referees? The author's own word-processing budget? The
copy-editors/proof-readers (the rest of the < 25%)? Or the classifiers
and maintainers of the electronic archive (these are currently called
"librarians" and they do not normally get a cut from the sale of the
author's text in any case).
So what is it that the "information broker" is doing that allows the
author to get on with his scholarly life instead of being a jack of all
trades? In paper, this was clear: The author did not have to spend his
time printing, disseminating and archiving his work for all; the
publisher did it for him (but unfortunately had to charge admission in
exchange). Where is the counterpart of this in the electronic medium
that would warrant reincarnating the Faustian bargain yet again, now
that there is clearly no need for it?
> 2.5 I therefore think that the possibility I raise in my "Future of the
> Journal" paper, namely that the electronic (and esoteric) sector could
> feature for some time as the sink for the material of lesser quality,
> could quite likely emerge.
Even within the paper medium itself, new journals always have to
struggle initially to establish a niche (and many fail, or fail to
attain a high level of prestige). This is true in spades when it is not
just a new journal that is at issue, but a new medium. So the
prediction that the Net will carry material of lower quality than paper
initially is quite a safe one to make (I myself have described the Net
as a "Global Graffiti Board for Trivial Pursuit" till not that long
ago), but this has nothing at all to do either with esotericity or the
nature of the medium itself. The initial disparity is simply due to
history, demographics and initial conditions. Paper currently holds
virtually all the scholarly cards (and the hearts and habits of the
major card-players) and the Net is a haven for the young and
unscholarly or not-yet-scholarly.
But don't bank on it. The house of cards is also poised to collapse.
All that's needed is something that will overcome the primarily MENTAL
obstacles that exist currently: mainly superstitious habits and beliefs
about correlations between paper and quality, correlations that are
there, to be sure, but for arbitrary historical reasons rather than
functional ones -- indeed, as I am trying to suggest, these reasons are
becoming increasingly DISfunctional, and THAT will be what finally
makes the paper house of cards collapse.
> 3.1 I've found the debate about where the costs of publication really
> lie very interesting. It may turn out to be true that the "ordinary"
> publishers are exaggerating the costs which the network will not
> substitute, by a factor of about three (their "over 70 per cent", as
> against your "less than 25 per cent"). If it does, I shall be a bit
> surprised since most of them depend, for earning their living, on being
> more or less right about that kind of thing.
Indeed. But the PREMISE of such livelihood-preserving calculations is
that one must continue to earn one's living essentially the same way.
(As I suggested, those who have calculated the true per-page costs as
75% rather than 25%, as I do, have only been reckoning what electronic
processing will save from a system that is designed to produce PAPER
pages, as they do; let them redo it for a system designed solely to
produce electronic pages.)
If I am right, publishers will have to be prepared to do a major
restructuring (and reconceptualizing) of their role in esoteric
scholarly publishing or else this anomalous portion of the symbiotic
author/publisher system will simply break off and start anew, as an
autonomous form of publication. The key factor is that the Faustian
Bargain is no longer necessary; the true per-page costs (and a fair
return) for esoteric publication can be recovered on a page-subsidy model.
There is no longer any need to charge admission to a show that
virtually no one wants to see.
> 3.2 I think one reason for their caution about electronic substitution
> is because they find speculation about alternative cost-recovery models
> very complex and difficult.
Indeed; but that does not make those models wrong, or impossible. Nor
does it support your suggestion that publishers must be doing the
calculations correctly because that's what they do for a living...
But there are (and there inevitably will be) publishers who DO
understand the arithmetic (MIT Press seems to be one such publisher),
and it is my hope that their efforts will eventually lead in a direction
that serves the interests of all, without Faustian conflict, and without
heroic efforts to preserve the unstable and far-from-optimal status
quo.
> But one of the two main purposes of
> substitution is to address a perceived economic problem - the other
> being to introduce one further industry to the IT revolution. The road
> from yesterday contains enough litter from high-tech disaster projects
> to suggest some caution, at least, on the economic/costing front.
> Remember; the conclusions reached are for testing in settings where red
> faces are the least of the penalties for being proved wrong.
By all means. But I don't see esoteric scholarly/scientific publishing
as a potential cash cow for any big IT ventures (perhaps for popular and
wide-spectrum scholarly/scientific publishing, but not for the esoteric
region of the continuum). This no-market form of publishing is essential
to us all -- it's what keeps human learned inquiry going. But the trade
model just does not fit it (and never did).
Besides, most of us are talking about shrinking and restructuring rather
than big, risky investments; that's mostly what the migration from paper
to the Net entails (see Andrew Odlyzko's paper).
> At present, the "information superhighway"
> itself does not exist internationally in a form which could cope with
> the information traffic currently carried (not very efficiently) by
> print on paper (the "fat pipe" under the Atlantic at 1.5 Mbps is surely
> hopelessly inadequate?)... Print on paper is currently
> carrying a colossal amount of information into all sorts of unlikely
> academic places.
This is an empirical question, and not in my domain of expertise, but I
have heard that, once we decide to make a commitment to carrying the
(scholarly/scientific) information that way, the Net will be ABUNDANTLY
able to bear the weight. In any case, it is not clear to me who should
be worrying about capacity problems these days, when people are passing
vast quantities of, for example, porno-graphics, freely back and forth
on the Net. Metaphors, of course, settle nothing, but my own image of
the full corpus of esoteric periodical publishing (see Andrew Odlyzko's
essay for some sample figures) as the flea on the tail of the dog,
insofar as the Net's carrying capacity is concerned, especially in the
future, when more and more of the rest of the traffic will be
commercial and paid for (because it DOES have a market).
Humanity will be better served by granting that flea a free ride in
perpetuum, rather than treating it as if it were another commercial
traveller.
It's odd, by the way, that the "Net Capacity" and "Net Highway Toll"
alarms are so often sounded by individuals who are no better informed
than you or I are, but in whose interests it would be if there WERE an
awkward capacity limitation or a prohibitive toll...
> 4.2 An important additional consideration on this point, in my view, is
> what I might call "the mental preparation of the sector". The academic
> sector, in my view, has been right to point to the serious mistakes
> made in some industries where technological advance has been implanted
> without adequate preparation of the work force, in the form of
> reorientation of work processes and training of working people. We are
> now seriously contemplating the most dramatic change in the working
> habits of scholars for some centuries, but I look in vain for
> convincing signs that our sector appreciates this and is collectively
> bending its mind to preparing for the consequences. There is far too
> much "Throw the technology at them and they'll get on with it". A
> change of this magnitude is going to cause confusion and muddle anyway
> for a time, but we ought to be doing far more to minimise that. Our
> present approach, in my view, is asking for trouble. One of the biggest
> drags on the introduction of advanced technology solutions lies in the
> attitude of the people for whom we consider them to be intended. It's
> crucial that a much better effort is directed to changing that.
I agree with this completely. Authors, readers, librarians, etc. do
need to be prepared, informed, etc. But that's not an argument for the
status quo, or even for slowing down (the pace of the move toward electronic
journals is already excruciatingly slow, to my tastes: 99.9999% of the
esoteric scholarly periodical literature is still in paper, after all;
hence there is no precipitous hurtling toward an unknown doom going
on here!). Preparing the populace should be undertaken pari passu with
the migration itself, but certainly not prior to it, or instead of
it...
> When I
> had to cancel some physics journals a few months ago, our physicists
> gave me the impression that I was bringing the roof down on their
> department, and Paul Ginsparg wasn't mentioned once in their
> remonstrations - though I've no doubt they're well aware of what he's
> doing.
This is not surprising, and I don't think it is evidence of anything
more than that no one has a rational command yet over what is happening
and what is about to happen. It is because of this irrational factor
that I never make predictions about WHEN it will all happen; I simply
affirm THAT it will happen (and the sooner the better)...
> There is some belief out there that the present system will collapse
> and change suddenly quite soon but it's not very widespread - though it
> may be right. Otherwise, it implies that Southampton University Library
> must shed 300 print journals every year from now till 2010. At present,
> that does not look very likely and this means the process will have to
> accelerate substantially (and I expect it will) later in the period.
I suspect it will be a critical-mass effect: After a slow linear phase,
consisting mostly of new electronic journals rather than migrations of
established paper journals (though you are probably right that,
unfortunately, the weaker paper journals make take to the skies first)
as well as regressive "hybrid" projects (paper journals offering a
double deal: paper plus electronic version, but to subscribers only,
aimed eventually at developing an electronic-only subscriber base), a
critical mass of free-access refereed electronic journals will form and
demonstrate that they can be as rigorous as refereed paper journals,
but with the added advantage of (1) universal searchability and access
as well as (2) interactivity (peer commentary). That -- with the help
of subversive projects like Paul Ginsparg's HEP Archive and Public
Preprint/Reprint Archives created by authors -- will trigger a
relatively rapid and dramatic restructuring that will end with most or
all of the esoteric periodical corpus airborne.
> 4.4 Rereading some of what you and Andrew have written makes me wonder
> whether we are really that far apart. My job is to cope with today's
> reality (which is largely, like it or not, both papyrocentric and
> commercial) and try to anticipate the next few years' (say, five or at
> most ten) changes reasonably intelligently. You and Andrew appear to be
> speculating about a revolution which I am satisfied will come - though
> I seriously doubt your present economic assumptions - and I sometimes
> get the impression that Andrew might not disagree strongly with my
> speculation and the speculation of my librarian colleagues as to the
> time scale. I'm less sure, Stevan, about your views as to likely time
> scales.
Ah, I wisely refrain from committing myself to numbers when it comes to
time scale. I stick to (1) editing and adapting PSYCOLOQUY as a model
and to (2) trying to describe what is actually happening, what is
possible, and what is rational in talks and papers. Chronology must
fend for itself. (But if it's my 'druthers you're inquiring about,
it can't happen too soon for me.)
> 5.1 One of the points I'm trying to underline in pointing out that
> journal publishing is an industry is that it will not sit quietly by
> and let itself be subverted. We must assume that, if a concerted plan
> emerges to cut major traditional publishers out from the knowledge
> communication business, they will fight very strongly for their "share
> of the action". Commercial publishers will have revenue streams to
> defend, not least in the interest of the people they employ and of
> their shareholders, and even learned societies and academic presses
> could face massive upheaval if revenue-earning titles (which are also
> circulated gratis to some as a privilege of membership) appear to be in
> danger of complete substitution, and they will fight to prevent that.
No doubt. But what will eventually prevail, I hope, is what is in the
best interests of scholars/scientists and Learned Inquiry itself. As
most of our intellectual wares (99.9999%, as I said, and add more 9's
for the retrospective literature) are currently on the paper flotilla,
it is in ALL of our interests to ensure that that flotilla does not
sink prematurely. I believe a benign solution is possible to effect an
orderly transition to the skies, one that will be fair to all;
publishers simply need to be flexible and innovative, and not be
tempted to adopt the short-sighted strategy of filibustering in favor
of some version or other of the status quo. It just won't fly.
> 5.2 One of the main points that publishers are likely to raise in this
> country, and probably in Western Europe generally, will be to question
> (to put it no more strongly) the propriety of academic institutions
> using public money (all UK universities bar one very small one are
> funded by the taxpayer) in order to drive a viable industry (as they
> see it) to the wall. Perhaps the government will be happy to see the
> publishers as resembling the toll bridge owners of past centuries whose
> bizarre privileges were bought out or set aside with the growth of the
> road network. But the mood in the UK, even among universities
> themselves, is to press for more and more activities to go down the
> "charging" road.
You will not be surprised, perhaps, that this scenario evokes little
empathy. I hope the motivation on all sides will be more constructive
than this. Esoteric scholarly publishing is motivated by something far
more important to us all than the money to be made from selling its texts.
> Our government believes passionately in markets - I
> think it claims it got its predilection for them from the United
> States! - and I can see it saying: "You must allow commercial academic
> publishers onto the academic superhighway on terms which allow them to
> compete fairly for the survival of their role". I don't think this
> necessarily means that it should always be carried out in the same way
> as now - but they must be given a reasonable chance to adapt.
This makes it sound as if the only problem is access to the Internet:
But there WILL be a lot of toll-way traffic on the Internet. That is
absolutely irrelevant to the issue under discussion here. Unless
publishers are planning to re-tool themselves as telecommunications
companies, they are not the ones for whom those bells would toll in any
case! (This is a red herring, just as the capacity argument is.)
Paul Ginsparg's HEPnet currently gets 35,000 "hits" per day -- 35,000
physicists the world over retrieving articles. It is simplistic to
conceptualize Net use as a finite resource (dramatic increases in Net
capacity can be gotten for relatively small investments in money and
material; and it makes little sense to tax the number of bits received
or the time spent receiving them in an interdigitating network with
varying transmission times, especially if the Net is far from
saturation), so it is a mistake to imagine a toll on each "hit."
But suppose things did go in that direction: If the Net were privatised
(and apparently it is about to be), AND if the Universities chose to
pass on to their user communities the 10% increase in costs this would
entail over their current flat connection costs, this still would not
be reckoned on a "per hit" basis, but as a flat rate. Users would pay
their own flat rates for unlimited sending and retrieval, and the rest
would depend on WHAT they were retrieving: If it was a commercial
newspaper or magazine, they would be prepared to pay a further toll, as
they do now (and the writers of the material, and their publishers)
would make a fair profit from that toll.
But what if it was a scholarly article that only ten people would ever
want to read, and from which the author would never make a penny? Even
on this commercial tollway model there is no way to make it rational to
squeeze a further fee out of the would-be esoteric reader. It's a
foregone conclusion that the author, eager to be read, would happily
spring in advance for ten complimentary tickets for those few who will
ever want to see his show. Bref: The trade model makes no sense for
esoteric publication EVEN ON A COMPLETELY COMMERCIALIZED NET, and there
is still no money for the publisher to make for the sale of words no
one wants to buy!
The real service that esoteric publishing provides is to authors, their
institutions and their research funding sources: The "product" they
provide is not the author's words for those who want to buy them but
the means of access to the eyes and minds of the author's
fellow-specialists. Hence that's the natural place to seek to recoup
the true expenses of providing that service. I hope it is becoming
evident by now how hopelessly Procrustean a trade model is for a
product/service/market like this.
> I'm genuinely surprised that you appear to think that it will be
> politically acceptable in the United States to make most scholarly
> information a non-tradeable commodity. I don't think it will be here.
The United States has little to do with this. The question is: Why and
for whom do scholars publish? The answer is radically different from
the answer to the question of why an author who makes his living by
writing publishes. The esoteric market will simply reflect this, once
it has been released from its Faustian bonds to the commercial market.
"Trade" there will still be, but it will be the selling of the services
(25% of paper costs per page) of the esoteric publisher to the esoteric
AUTHOR and his institutions rather than to the esoteric READER and his
institutions, as it was under the Faustian model. There is a "subsidy" in
both cases: Institutions provided it through their library subscriptions
the old way; the new way, much less expensive, the (25%) subsidies will be
up front. And apart from the Institutions having to pay much less for the
availability of the esoteric scholarly corpus, individual
scholar/readers will be the greatest beneficiaries, now able to search,
browse and read one another's work in the Virtual Library to their
hearts and minds content, never having to worry about paying a toll to
go where virtually no one cares to go anyway.
What possible objection (or role) could the United States have in
something like that?
> 6. Maybe these few remarks have irrevocably confirmed my typecast for
> you! They are among the reasons why I think evolution is a better mode
> than revolution and why I think that the economic problems which
> libraries and others face in the scholarly communication field are
> unlikely to be resolved by an agreement that it should all be for free
> in an electronic setting. -- Bernard Naylor
For the record, I'm for evolution rather than revolution too, and I
have my fingers crossed for a peaceful, fair and orderly evolution
rather than a revolution that produces casualties to anyone. And I'm
also for paying the true costs of refereed electronic periodical
publishing (they are low, but they are not zero); I am simply opposed
to having them paid (and/or surcharged) on a completely inappropriate
trade/subscription model (subsidized by University Libraries).
Everyone's interests would be better reflected and served if they were
paid an author/subsidy model.
Stevan Harnad
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:57:37 EDT
Reply-To: David Stodolsky
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: David Stodolsky
Subject: Re: Electronic Editorial Office Costs
Stevan Harnad writes:
> field by field is the ULTIMATE (cross-journal) acceptance rate: It is
> my belief that in one form or other, just about EVERYTHING gets
> published eventually, if the author is persistent enough, even if it's
> in the unrefereed vanity press. Having approximately the same
> manuscript refereed repeatedly for different journals is a drain on
> resources, but I'm not sure how to get around it: the prestige
> hierarchy is based in part on (intellectual) competition.
Moving the arena of competition from publication rates to citation
rates is one way. Since almost everything gets published, why not just
abandon this competition? There is no economic justification for prior
review in electronic publication. Various preprint archives have already
demonstrated that direct publication is viable.
Even with traditional publication, citation rates are given more weight
than publication rates. Trying to move the old mechanisms of accreditation
on-line is domed to failure, in the long run. We need more powerful
methods of evaluating citations. The old system of just counting them
has always been recognized as inadequate. Networking tools allow us
to see whether a citation supports or opposes a given publication.
This can reflect back upon the "publication rate". If an author sees
that his/her article is being devalued by numerous bad reviews, then
it would be wise to take it "out of circulation".
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: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:58:41 EDT
Reply-To: Hans Andriese
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Hans Andriese
Organization: NLnet
Subject: Re: VT model
I expect Adobe's Acrobat family of products (for viewing, printing and
exchange of formatted documents) to get a 'hook' that enables WWW
browsing of its PostScript-based format.
Then it will be possible to publish a formatted document (wordprocessor
of DTP does not matter) complete with illustrations via WWW and do full
text search, download parts and print it like the author intended the
page to look like.
Hans
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hans G. Andriese Andriese Consultancy handrie@inter.NL.net
Amsterdam NL Phone: +31 20 6976 299 Fax: +31 20 6913 678
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:59:31 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Paul Ginsparg Replies from the French Alps (Les Houches, Chamonix)
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 94 11:45:34 -0600
From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353
Subject: Re: On Trade vs. Esoteric Publication
stevan,
(i know i promised e-mail blackout, but i found myself with a bunch of
networkphilic physicists so it became reasonable to restructure the
local environment with a lan and internet feed...)
just a few comments on the most recent (as usual from my pragmatic and
non-visionary approach -- in current commercial parlance "just do it"):
>From: "B.Naylor"
>Date: Thu, 4 Aug 94 17:38:16 BST
> 4.1 On the question of technology, I am reasonably confident that I
> have not come across any technological problems which I don't think can
> be solved. There are still important questions as to: how soon? and by
> whom? and at what cost? At present, the "information superhighway"
> itself does not exist internationally in a form which could cope with
> the information traffic currently carried (not very efficiently) by
> print on paper (the "fat pipe" under the Atlantic at 1.5 Mbps is surely
> hopelessly inadequate?) and the other problems I referred to in my
> paper are also with us and have to be resolved if an electronic
> solution is to operate satisfactorily. Print on paper is currently
> carrying a colossal amount of information into all sorts of unlikely
> academic places.
i have always been perplexed by what goes into other people's calculation
of bandwidth. finally i realized that they are talking about transmitting
uncompressed bitmaps: an 8.5" x 11" page scanned at 300 dpi is roughly
a Mb. but remember that all the whitespace compresses extremely well
so this is already a grotesque overestimate. moreover in an earlier segment
of this thread, we pointed out that the "scan and shred" technique was
backward-looking, just adding additional expense with network distribution
an ad-hoc afterthought. the savings are enormous if one avoids the paper
stage entirely, instead retaining the electronic form the documents
typically *already* possess.
(for comparison a page of ascii is 3-4kb, and less than half that after
compression -- so we typically gain a factor of 500 over the raw bitmap.
using a sophisticated page markup language such as compressed postscript
[or preferably its successor [Adobe's pdf] with full font and graphics
capability, the savings remain dramatic.)
yes it will be a major task to render all the currently existing "print on
paper" to network distributable form if that is desired, but we need to
point out repeatedly that the issue of costs under discussion centers on
a medium that is text from inception to final distribution.
even the "fat pipe" as a bottleneck is a red herring in any event, one
can always run mirrors (as i run in italy and japan) to ensure adequate
bandwidth -- that way only a single transfer accross the weakest link
is necessary.
and speaking of "unlikely academic places", i am currently organizing
a physics summer school in the french alps (les houches, next to chamonix --
i had expected to be out of network range but found an old hp 715 here
and together with some other stone age implements forged a 64 kbit/s
internet link -- say goodbye to minitel) and the students are from all over
the world. the most common comment regarding the physics archives is how
much they have *already* improved the situation in developing and former
eastern-block countries, where the "colossal volume of print on paper"
does not penetrate due to cost and other issues.
at lanl, the systems i'm running still consume less than .01% (i.e. .0001)
of the lanl.gov backbone capacity so we really do realize stevan's "flea
on tail" metaphor.
> When I had to cancel some physics journals a few months ago, our physicists
> gave me the impression that I was bringing the roof down on their
> department, and Paul Ginsparg wasn't mentioned once in their
> remonstrations - though I've no doubt they're well aware of what he's
> doing.
well it is still premature. note that the current physics archives
branched out from high energy particle physics and do not yet cover close
to the whole of physics. this was primarily due to lack of resources (i.e.
zero) at my end, a situation recently rectified, and when i get back to the
u.s. in mid sept there will be a dramatic horizontal expansion. (but even
so it may be a couple more years before you can cut physics journals without
complaint.)
> 4.3 I recently asked a group of about twenty chief university
> librarians (that is, about 20 per cent of the total UK cohort) "by what
> date do you expect your present number of current subscriptions to
> print-on-paper journals will have been reduced by 80 per cent". The
> extremes were "1995" and "2050" with 2010 by far the favourite
> prediction (2010 was mine as well - honestly). (I said I thought that
> might be a way, for some of them, of saying "after I've retired".)
your colleagues are incorrect. the driving force will not only be economics
but the enhanced functionality of the electronic medium. there are many
things that the new medium supports (see e.g. http://xxx.lanl.gov/hypertex/ ),
including the overall fluid nature (on-line annotations, continuously
graded refereeing, automated hyperlinks to distributed resources including
non-text based applications, etc., etc.) that simply have no analog in print.
it will be more or less like moving from radio to television -- radio remains
for those things for which it's better optimized, but the majority of new
material will move to the new medium.
> 5.1 One of the points I'm trying to underline in pointing out that
> journal publishing is an industry is that it will not sit quietly by
> and let itself be subverted. We must assume that, if a concerted plan
> emerges to cut major traditional publishers out from the knowledge
> communication business, they will fight very strongly for their "share
> of the action". Commercial publishers will have revenue streams to
> defend, not least in the interest of the people they employ and of
> their shareholders, and even learned societies and academic presses
> could face massive upheaval if revenue-earning titles (which are also
> circulated gratis to some as a privilege of membership) appear to be in
> danger of complete substitution, and they will fight to prevent that.
this will proceed quickly. the subversion is that their bottom line will
be removed.
formerly we were at their mercy because we needed their production and
distribution facilities. now we can outdo them on both counts, at
dramatically reduced cost. at the same time, we expose how little
intellectual added value they provide in general (i mean the validation
and identification of significant research which can only come from
within the community.) sure they could remain in the game if they were
willing to scale down to the more efficient operation enabled by the
fully electronic medium, but the bottom line will not be there for them
and they will have little ability to compete with a streamlined
operation organized by researchers in alliance with their research
libraries (and perhaps non-profit professional societies).
> 5.2 One of the main points that publishers are likely to raise in this
> country, and probably in Western Europe generally, will be to question
> (to put it no more strongly) the propriety of academic institutions
> using public money (all UK universities bar one very small one are
> funded by the taxpayer) in order to drive a viable industry (as they
> see it) to the wall.
but why is it currently viewed as appropriate to use gov't funds to sponsor
this same "viable" industry in the form of overhead on grants that
eventually makes its way to research libraries for transfer to them???
re:
>> Date: Tue, 9 Aug 94 17:12:04 EDT
>> From: "Stevan Harnad"
>> Paul Ginsparg's HEPnet currently gets 35,000 "hits" per day -- 35,000
>> physicists the world over retrieving articles.
one small clarification:
actually it is just over 20,000 users (and more than just physicists
since it has branched out into other fields including computational
linguistics and economics). the 35,000 "hits" per day include all variety
of searches, etc., not each an article retrieval.
pg
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 09:00:16 EDT
Reply-To: Ann Okerson
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Ann Okerson
Subject: Symposium on Scholarly E-Publishing Announced
THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES
THE ASSOCIATION OF RESEARCH LIBRARIES
And their collaborators: the University of Virginia Library, the
Johns Hopkins University Press, and the American Physical Society
ANNOUNCE
Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks: The Fourth Symposium
Filling the Pipeline and Paying the Piper
NOVEMBER 5-7
Washington, DC
Including: Demonstrations of Current Scholarship and Projects
For the complete program and registration information on the Internet:
GOPHER as follows: yourprompt> gopher arl.cni.org
Menu: Scholarly Communication, Then: ARL/AAUP Symposia
This three-day symposium, the fourth in a series sponsored by the AAUP
and ARL, with a great deal of help from our many friends, is
specifically aimed at university presses, learned and professional
society publishers, librarians, and academic faculty and researchers
interested in beginning electronic publications, particularly on for
distribution via electronic networks. The Symposium's objective is to
promote information-sharing and discussion among people interested in
developing the potential of the networks, particularly for formal
publishing, with particular emphasis on not-for-profit models. Anyone
interested in this topic is eagerly welcomed to join us. Presenters
will discuss some of the latest research and development from the
not-for-profit sector, including faculty, societies, presses, and
libraries.
The Symposium has established itself as a place where different
not-for-profit stakeholders and supporters talk to each other about
their work and confront vexing issues together. This year, in
particular, we will focus on the controversial areas of cost recovery in
an electronic environment and electronic fair use. The program
committee, encouraged by registrants' comments, hopes that symposiasts
can help to build understanding and progress in these topics, which are
critical to a robust, organized future for scholarly communications.
Optional tours on November 8th include "A Day at the Press," sponsored
by the Johns Hopkins University, and "A day in the Academical Village,"
by the University of Virginia Library.
Programs will be mailed out on Friday to those on our paper mailing
lists. If you would like to receive a printed program, contact Lisabeth
King, lisabeth@cni.org
E-mail address for general inquiries: symposium@e-math.ams.org
E-mail for registration inquiries: Lisabeth King
(lisabeth@cni.org)
Proceedings of previous symposia available. E-mail allyn@cni.org
------------
Ann Okerson/Association of Research Libraries
ann@cni.org
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 08:35:37 EDT
Reply-To: "I.Pitchford-InterPsych"
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: "I.Pitchford-InterPsych"
Subject: Vacancies
InterPsych requires two enthusiastic volunteers:
1. EDITOR
---------
To take over management of the InterPsych Newsletter. This
publication has a circulation of something like 10,000, and reaches
many influential people at universities and professional
organizations throughout the world. We need an enthusiastic and
experienced individual prepared to devote time and energy into
promoting the Newsletter and to increasing its influence and academic
standing. This is a great opportunity to make a contribution. Apply
now!
2. COMPUTER SCIENTIST
---------------------
To act as advisor to the Board of Directors and to assist InterPsych
members to gain the maximum benefit from their use of the Internet.
Duties will also involve working with us on a new journal to be
produced in WWW/Mosaic format, creating an InterPsych WWW server to
co-ordinate psychology/psychiatry/mental health resources on the
Internet, helping to encourage scholars to maintain ftp archives of
important papers and other information (1.8. gigabytes available for
this on Sheffield's ftp server), liaising with computer
hardware/software manufacturers to promote their awarenes of
InterPsych and our members' awareness of their work, and generally
doing everything possible to ensure that all possiblilities are fully
explored and exploited.
Needless to say this work is unpaid but you will have the opportunity
to work with some outstanding individuals and to play a real part in
helping to nurture the Internet towards its maturity, to increase
human understanding, and to bring some light to this dark corner of
the universe. How could mere money compete!
Applications to; Ian Pitchford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Pitchford, c/o Department of Biomedical Science, University of
Sheffield, Western Bank, SHEFFIELD, S10 2TN, United Kingdom.
E-mail: I.Pitchford@Sheffield.ac.uk, md932481@silver.shef.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For the psychiatry database telnet bubl.bath.ac.uk, login bubl. Search
the subject tree for 616.89 Psychiatry. Contributions welcome.
http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/home.html (BUBL)
http://mailbase.ac.uk/welcome.html (MAILBASE)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 08:36:37 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Is Peer Review Necessary at All in the Electronic Medium?
Here are two short follow-ups. The first contains some useful
background citations, the second an often-repeated proposal (that we
dispense with peer review in the electronic medium) with which I
strongly disagree. As I have replied to this kind of suggestion many
times before I will not reply again here. The interested reader is
referred to prior discussion of the "Invisible Hand" effect, quality
control, and quality tagging. -- SH.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: AJ Meadows
Subject: Electronic Journal Costs
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 94 13:38:25 BST
I have been following with interest your discussion of this topic. Just
one or two minor comments:
(1) The best source I know for data on journal use and economics is:
D.W.King et al Scientific Journals in the United States (Hutchinson
Ross Pub Co;1981). It refers to print journals only and is a little out
of date, of course.
(2) Comparative data on journal rejection rates was published a good
many years ago by R. K. Merton at Columbia. My colleagues and I have
looked at these from time to time and they still seem to give
comparative rates fairly well.
(3) We are experimenting with an electronic journal that assumes
distribution via a library. From this viewpoint, you have to add on the
costs of the library getting ready to receive such journals. We
estimate that, for the first such journal, the cost is of the order of
#3,500.
Jack Meadows
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:57:37 EDT
From: David Stodolsky
Stevan Harnad writes:
> field by field is the ULTIMATE (cross-journal) acceptance rate: It is
> my belief that in one form or other, just about EVERYTHING gets
> published eventually, if the author is persistent enough, even if it's
> in the unrefereed vanity press. Having approximately the same
> manuscript refereed repeatedly for different journals is a drain on
> resources, but I'm not sure how to get around it: the prestige
> hierarchy is based in part on (intellectual) competition.
Moving the arena of competition from publication rates to citation
rates is one way. Since almost everything gets published, why not just
abandon this competition? There is no economic justification for prior
review in electronic publication. Various preprint archives have already
demonstrated that direct publication is viable.
Even with traditional publication, citation rates are given more weight
than publication rates. Trying to move the old mechanisms of accreditation
on-line is domed to failure, in the long run. We need more powerful
methods of evaluating citations. The old system of just counting them
has always been recognized as inadequate. Networking tools allow us
to see whether a citation supports or opposes a given publication.
This can reflect back upon the "publication rate". If an author sees
that his/her article is being devalued by numerous bad reviews, then
it would be wise to take it "out of circulation".
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, 15 Aug 1994 08:37:16 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Odlyzko on Net Capacity and Citation Frequency
From: amo@research.att.com (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 94 06:57 EDT
To: Bernard Naylor B.Naylor@soton.ac.uk
Subject: Balance Point and the economics of ejournals/
Bernard,
Thank you very much for your comments, and please excuse the delay
in responding to them, but I was away on a trip when they arrived.
In the meantime, Stevan Harnad and Paul Ginsparg have responded
to your message. I agree with what they say, and have only a few
minor comments to add.
1. Inadequacies of present networks:
You are right that the present 1.5 Mbps pipe over (or under)
the Atlantic is inadequate for full-scale scholarly communication.
It can carry about 5 TB (tera-bytes) in a year. In my article
I estimated that just the mathematical literature alone requires
about 1 TB to store (with fax compression). However, network
speeds are increasing at dramatic rates, and soon we will have
an adequate infrastructure in place.
As an aside, we can obtain much higher quality of material and
lower communication burdens by converting the old documents into
TeX, say. This is not as hard as it might seem. In mathematics
there are about 20 M pages of printed material. At the rates
that skilled typists in the US command, it would cost $ 200-400 M
to typeset them into TeX. By going to the Third World we could
lower this to the $ 50-100 M range. (Obviously there aren't
enough skilled typists in the Third World or even in the
industrialized world to do this quickly, but the conversion
could be done over 5-10 years, which would offer opportunities
to train the necessary labor force.) For comparison, the existing
mathematics print journals cost about $ 200 M per year. Thus
a fraction of the annual cost of today's system would suffice
to convert all the literature to a modern format. I expect
similar estimates apply to other fields. The trouble would be
in organizing this conversion effort.
2. Time scales:
Here are some comments on what you wrote:
4.3 I recently asked a group of about twenty chief
university librarians (that is, about 20 per cent of the
total UK cohort) "by what date do you expect your present
number of current subscriptions to print-on-paper journals
will have been reduced by 80 per cent". The extremes were
"1995" and "2050" with 2010 by far the favourite prediction
(2010 was mine as well - honestly). (I said I thought that
might be a way, for some of them, of saying "after I've
retired".) There is some belief out there that the present
system will collapse and change suddenly quite soon but
it's not very widespread - though it may be right.
Otherwise, it implies that Southampton University Library
must shed 300 print journals every year from now till
2010. At present, that does not look very likely and this
means the process will have to accelerate substantially
(and I expect it will) later in the period.
I am rather surprised that so many of these librarians picked 2010
as the date for a major change. I would have expected them to
be much more conservative.
I agree fully with you and Stevan that the drop in paper journal
subscriptions will be very nonlinear. The most dramatic part
of the drop is likely to occur between 2000 and 2010. I would
be surprised if it occurred this decade, since networks and
computer capacities are not adequate yet, and there is tremendous
inertia in the system. On the other hand, it's hard for me to
imagine print journals surviving more than 15 years in large
numbers, as by 2010 the world will be fully "wired."
4.4 Rereading some of what you and Andrew have written
makes me wonder whether we are really that far apart. My
job is to cope with today's reality (which is largely, like
it or not, both papyrocentric and commercial) and try to
anticipate the next few years' (say, five or at most ten)
changes reasonably intelligently. You and Andrew appear to
be speculating about a revolution which I am satisfied will
come - though I seriously doubt your present economic
assumptions - and I sometimes get the impression that
Andrew might not disagree strongly with my speculation and
the speculation of my librarian colleagues as to the time
scale. I'm less sure, Stevan, about your views as to
likely time scales.
You are right, we are not that far off in our opinions. My essay
looked at the future about two decades from now, when all the
novel features should be in place. Its aim was to show people
what will be available then, and why the present system is bound
to collapse. It dealt hardly at all with how to get there from
here. That is a thornier issue, and one I now have to devote some
thought to, as I am on some committees that are supposed to
make recommendations for near-term actions.
The transition to electronic publishing is likely to be turbulent,
and I do not wish to make it sound too easy. As just one example,
it is likely that various administrators will cease on the
projections of low-cost electronic publishing of scholarly journals
and decide that this will allow them to save the bulk of their
libraries' costs. However, while electronic journals can easily
eliminate or at least drastically lower journal subscription
costs, these costs are at most one third of the total cost of
running research libraries. Since conversion of libraries to
digital formats is going to be a long process, immediate savings
are likely to be considerably smaller than such administrators
might hope for.
Best regards,
Andrew Odlyzko
Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research
Communication. Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of
Physics). http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/
Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending
demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of
Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine
Studies), to appear. Condensed version to appear in Notices of the
Amercan Mathematical Society, January 1995.
ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: amo@research.att.com (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 94 08:40 EDT
Subject: citation frequency
Stevan,
In your comments on Bernard Naylor's "A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO THE
SUBVERSIVE DISCUSSION," one passage caught my eye, namely
Let's be more specific. Though it's risky to resort to figures from
hearsay (and that is all I must confess I have so far), I am confident
enough in what I am about to point out that even if I am wrong by one or
two orders of magnitude, the upshot is the same: The average published
scientific article has fewer than 10 readers and no citers; I'll bet the
same is true for the average piece of scholarship in the humanities.
I expect that your figure for no citers for the average scientific article
is ultimately derived from the same source that I have seen quoted on
many other occasions, namely the Science Citation Index (SCI). As I recall,
the SCI figures indicated that only a couple of mathematics journals
achieved an average of more than one citation to one of their articles,
and most were well under one. Now if the average number of citations
per article is below 0.5, then it certainly follows that most articles
are not cited at all.
I have long been suspicious of the SCI figures, based on my own experience
with them. It seemed that only a small selection of mathematics journals
was covered, since often references that I knew existed would not be
included in the SCI listings. However, your comment stimulated me to
do some more thinking and research, and I believe I can show by a simple
argument that the SCI estimates are bogus.
I have just picked up the latest issues of three mathematics journals
that have accumulated on my stack of correspondence during my recent
trip. They were from several areas of mathematics, and all were primary
research journals, not survey ones. They contained 35 articles, and
these 35 articles had a total of about 630 references, for an average
of 18 references per article. (The range of number of references
was from 3 to 51, and 18 seemed to be close to the median as well.)
It seemed that of those typical 18 references, about 4 were to books,
so there were usually about 14 references to research papers. This
is a small sample, but it seems to me to be typical of the papers
I see in mathematics, and so I did not bother to collect more data.
It would be interesting to obtain similar estimates for other fields.
The figure of 14 backward references in a research paper is sufficient
all by itself to show that the SCI figures are far from the truth.
Since the scholarly literature is growing, the average number of references
to a paper MUST BE IN EXCESS OF 14. To see this, consider a
simple model in which papers published in a given decade reference
only papers from the previous decade. In mathematics, about
250,000 papers were published during the 70s. Had there been only
250,000 papers published during the 80s, and each one referenced
an average of 14 papers, each of the papers from the 70s would on
average be referenced 14 times. However, the 80s saw the
publication of 500,000 research articles in mathematics. Had they
referenced an average of 14 papers from the 70s each, it would
necessarily follow that the average number of citations per paper
from the 70s would be 28. Thus it seems reasonable to estimate
that the average number of citations to a mathematics paper is
in the 15-30 range.
Comments:
1. This argument does not have much bearing on the discussion of
electronic journals. However, it might be important in terms
of general policy issues. If the typical scholarly paper
does get cited 30 times, as opposed to disappearing without
a trace in the vast scholarly literature, then it is much
easier to argue that public support for the original research
and subsequent publication is warranted.
2. The above argument can be used only to estimate the mean number
of citations of a paper. For many purposes the median is a
more useful figure, and it would be nice to obtain the complete
distribution.
3. As long as only the mean number of citations is of interest,
it is possible to obtain a much better estimate than that
presented above with only a little more work. It would suffice
to take the 35 papers that I used and note the year of publication
of each of the 630 references. Since we do have good data for
the total number of mathematics papers published each year (from
the reviewing journals Math. Rev. and Zentralblatt), we could
then obtain a much better estimate for the total number of
citations that a paper attracts, as well as the distribution
of the time after publication that a paper is cited most often.
This would provide much better data than that of SCI at a
tiny fraction of the cost.
4. The procedure suggested above, of sampling backward references,
would not provide information on the variation in the impact that
individual papers have, at least not without large sample sizes
that would provide information about repeated references to a
particular paper.
5. In my article I used the figure of 20 serious readers per article.
I don't think this is inconsistent with the estimates above, since
scholars often reference papers that they are do not know in detail.
In mathematics, for example, a specialist in one area will often
cite a result from another area without verifying it. By a serious
reader in mathematics, I mean one who actually checks the techynical
details of the proofs at least to some extent. Clearly there are
many more readers who just glance at papers to see what is in them.
6. The SCI figures might be useful for gauging the relative merits
of various journals within a given field.
Have you seen any arguments like this, debunking the SCI estimates?
Best regards,
Andrew
-------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stevan Harnad (harnad@clarity.princeton.edu)
To: Andrew Odlyzko
Dear Andrew,
Very interesting analysis, and we certainly need a lot more like this.
I don't know of further literature, but perhaps those who read this
posting will. Three comments:
(1) I don't think we need to prove that the average article has many
readers or citers to justify esoteric research. First, some important
contibutions may be based on the work of very few people, who read and
cite only one another. And second, as in all areas of human endeavor,
there will always be the usual Gaussian cream-to-milk ratio: To skim of
the top .01% cream, you need to allow the full volume of milk. Let 1000
flowers bloom...
(2) It is not clear whether your sample of articles was a random sample
(i.e., whether they were average articles). This may not matter much,
but what certainly matters is the point you note: Are they mostly
citing one another or the cream of the crop (the rare "citation
classics")? If so, the latter, this would still leave the average
article (i.e., most) uncited and unread.
(3) There will no doubt be great variability in the answers to these
questions from field to field (and subfield). What I think you don't
contest is that, give or take an order or two of magnitude above and
below 10, the vast bulk of the scholarly corpus is still ESOTERIC: It
is a no-market literature. That's the key to the rationale for
abandoning the trade model.
Stevan Harnad
-------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 08:23:27 EDT
Reply-To: Fytton Rowland
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Fytton Rowland
Subject: MUSE papers
I have identified two papers about project MUSE:
Project MUSE: A New Venture in Electronic Scholarly Communication, by Todd
Kelley and Susan Lewis, in Newletter on Serials Pricing Issues, no. 109,
paper 2, 1994; and
Electronic Publication at Johns Hopkins: Project MUSE, by Susanna Pathak,
in EJournal, volume 4, number 2, lines 542-606, June 1994.
The interesting thing about these two papers is that apart from the titles
and the authors' names they are identical!
I appreciate that these are news items, not refereed papers; I also accept
that duplicate publication occurs in printed journals too. But we have all
had fears about bibliographic control problems with Internet publications.
I'd be interested in hearing Johns Hopkins University Press's comments
about their little contribution to the Internet chaos....
Fytton Rowland.
Fytton Rowland, Research Fellow, Phone +44 (0)1509 223057
Department of Information and Library Studies, Fax +44 (0)1509 223053
Loughborough University of Technology, Internet:
Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK J.F.Rowland@lut.ac.uk
"There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going"
(Edna St Vincent Millay)
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 08:23:54 EDT
Reply-To: Stevan Harnad
Sender: "Publishing E-Journals : Publishing, Archiving,
and Access"
From: Stevan Harnad
Subject: Esotericity and Citation Frequency
>Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 14:27:28 -0400
>From: quinn@math.vt.edu (Frank Quinn)
A few comments on Andrew's "citation frequency" message:
It is certainly true that there are big gaps in the coverage in the Science
Citation Index. It used to be that they skipped all monographs and
textbooks, as well as quite a number of journals. There are also "lost"
citations to preprint versions or with flawed bibliographic information.
They may have improved in the several years since I looked into this, but I
exp