Rowland, Fytton. ELECTRONIC JOURNALS: NEITHER FREE NOR EASY.
[1994, June. EJournal]
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June, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 2 ISSN 1054-1055
There are 886 lines in this issue.
An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
2879 Subscribers in 37 Countries
University at Albany, State University of New York
EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet
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ELECTRONIC JOURNALS: NEITHER FREE NOR EASY
Fytton Rowland, Research Fellow
Department of Information & Library Studies
Loughborough University of Technology
J.F.Rowland@lut.ac.uk
My perspective on questions of publishing, archiving and accessing
electronic journals is that of someone who trained as an information
scientist, has worked for most of the last 25 years for not-for-profit
learned-society publishers, and is now a research fellow in electronic
publishing in a university information & library studies department.
My impression is that much of the continuing debate actually has little
to do with the paper versus electronic issue. It is in fact quite an
old controversy that predates the computer, and reflects the
animosities that often exist between academics, librarians and
publishers -- with the publishers being, on the whole, the people that
everyone else loves to hate.
Academics have long wanted to control their own publication system, and
initially did so. Scholarly journals were edited by academics in their
spare time and published by university presses or learned societies.
If any full-time staff worked on them, they were relatively low-status
people very much in an "editorial assistant" position. Nor, indeed,
did academics hold librarians in very much higher esteem, and although
today academic librarians usually do formally have academic-related
status, they and their skills still are not always respected by
academics. The substantial departmental library at one of Britain's
most prestigious university departments --the Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge-- for example employs no qualified library staff at all, not
even a paraprofessional; the physicists run it themselves. I believe
that there is a romantic idea that if only academics did the whole job
themselves, as they did in some golden era in the past, then scholarly
communication would be quicker, cheaper and more effective than it is
with these various professional intermediaries --publishers,
subscription agents, librarians-- involved.
Why, then, did the golden age pass away? Was it just because of all
this slow and messy business of putting ink on to paper? I believe
that the major reason why professionals came into the picture was
because of the sheer quantity of scholarly material being published
--that is, because of the growth of the scholarly community producing
papers. A university library of a million volumes has to have a staff
of professional librarians. And while a journal publishing 15 papers a
year could be run on an "amateur" basis, one publishing 1500 papers a
year cannot, regardless of the medium it is published in. The sheer
administrative load of organizing the input, refereeing, copyediting,
formatting, and distribution of that many documents (including the ones
that get rejected, which generate work too) requires full-time staff.
And since these people have to eat, they need a salary. Contrary to
what some participants in discussions of electronic journals have
alleged, it is this area of "first-copy cost" that is responsible for
most of the cover price of a journal, not the paper, printing, binding
and postage costs. Yes, a purely electronic journal is inherently
somewhat cheaper than a paper one; but not a tiny fraction of the
cost. [line 473]
There is also the question of subsidy --an emotive word. I prefer to
put it that the costs of running a high-quality scholarly communication
system have to be covered from somewhere. Traditionally, one major
route by which universities subsidized scholarly publication was by
giving their libraries funds to buy journals. Controversy arose
because commercial publishers, from the 1940s onwards and led by the
unlamented Robert Maxwell, realized that there was scope for making
lots of profit here. However, not-for-profit publishers --university
presses and learned societies-- have a big presence in the scholarly
publishing field and cannot be criticized for excessive profit-taking.
The main cost is simply the pay of the people who do the work. Of
course, these people can be (and in the case of the presently free
electronic journals on the Internet, presumably are) subsidized in a
different way, by the university that originates the journal paying for
them. But for how long? And for how long will the network itself be
entirely free of charge at the point of use to the academic community,
anyway?
Another question --raised by Frank Quinn-- is how much of the work done
by journal staff needs doing at all? Is copyediting necessary? The
existing network journals are of necessity put out in straight ASCII
text for the most part, while paper journals that are being
experimentally offered in dual form (paper and electronic) acquire
their page-image bitmaps by scanning the printed pages. The craft
knowledge of typographers, graphic designers and even the despised
copyeditors is not negligible. They all serve to turn a crude,
possibly unreadable manuscript into a publishable paper. What an
advance it was when Graphical User Interfaces like Windows replaced
purely textual DOS screens --a great increase in user-friendliness. In
the same way, a pleasingly designed and laid out printed page, written
in correct and readable English, is more user-friendly than a
typescript (however scientifically correct) in poor English. So even
if no printed edition is published, I believe that the requirement for
quality will mean that some copyediting and design work will need to be
done by someone. [line 510]
In case it is felt that I am a pure Luddite, let me finally say that I
do believe that the networks have transformed informal academic
communication beyond all recognition, and in particular have
democratized the invisible college. Whereas in the past only those who
actually received the personal letters or phone calls, or who could
afford to attend the international conferences, were admitted to the
invisible college, now anyone anywhere can join discussion lists or
computer conferences or look at bulletin boards. This must be an
improvement. And formal communication should certainly be quicker, and
somewhat cheaper. The additional features available online, most
notably the ability to append open peer commentary to papers, are very
valuable too, and when the supernetworks come along we will be able to
add multimedia features to "papers." But we should not kid ourselves
that this will all happen at no cost and without specialist staff.
Fytton Rowland
Research Fellow
Department of Information & Library Studies
Loughborough University of Technology
J.F.Rowland@lut.ac.uk
[[ This essay in Volume 4 Number 2 of _EJournal_ (June, 1994) is (c) copyright
_EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby
assigns any and all financial interest to Fytton Rowland. This note must
accompany all sopies of this text. ]]
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