[An abridged version of the following essay appeared in
http://gopher.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk/
Times Higher Education Supplement Friday May 12. It was accompanied by a
commentary by Steve Fuller.
Submit a commentary on this exchange to be considered for inclusion in
the THES's Web archive and possible paper publication in THES, with
responses from the authors to
mailto:theschat@timsup2.demon.co.uk
Tim Greenhalgh, Multimedia, Times Higher Education Supplement).
Also branch a copy to mailto:harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
to have it considered for the Hypermail archive at this Web site.
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THE POSTGUTENBERG GALAXY:
HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE
Stevan Harnad
mailto:harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Department of Psychology and
Cognitive Sciences Centre
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/csc.html
University of Southampton
http://www.soton.ac.uk/
It is time to stop making apocalyptic predictions about the coming of
the electropublication era and to start providing concrete strategies
for hastening the day. But before proposing anything, I have to
describe in some detail an important parting of ways that will be
taking place as the literature is launched into cyberspace: The "trade"
literature (for want of a better word, though Shakespeare was hardly a
tradesman) will go one way, whereas the "esoteric" literature (of
specialised scholarly and scientific research) will go another. This
esoteric/trade distinction must be clearly understood and kept in mind
or none of what follows will make any sense.
The trade literature includes all texts that are written to be sold:
Trade authors wish to sell their words, and readers wish to buy them.
The trade literature includes everything from poetry and fiction to
journalism and entertainment. And little or nothing I say here will be
relevant to its publication in the electronic era, for my proposal
applies only to the esoteric literature, in fact, still more narrowly,
only to that subset of the esoteric literature that is published in
learned periodicals. The story for specialised scholarly monographs and
conference proceedings will be a similar one, but that will not be the
focus here either.
It is important not to misunderstand the term "esoteric" publication,
which really just means "written only for a small number of fellow
experts": Scientific and scholarly research has become increasingly
specialised. There are few individuals with the expertise or interest
to follow and understand what is being published in any given
subspecialty. Yet it is the pursuit of this specialised expertise that
has brought us all the benefits of science and scholarship: These
esoteric pursuits are what are revealing the mysteries of the atom,
the gene, the cancer cell, our language, our past, and human nature
itself.
And although the readership of any particular esoteric article is tiny,
the size of the esoteric serial literature as a whole is quite
substantial: First, there are the 6500 journals indexed by the
Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. These include the
core learned journals in science and engineering and a good portion of
the ones in the arts and humanities as well. Extending this estimate to
include the full esoteric serial literature in all disciplines
worldwide, one can probably append one more 0 to this figure and double
it (i.e., about 130,000 periodicals)
This total will include a few wide-circulation learned periodicals,
such as Science, Nature, and the American Scholar, and these should
perhaps not be treated as esoteric, but the vast majority of it fits
the criteria for esoteric literature, namely, that (1) the authors are
not paid for their texts and (2) the "market," in terms of individual
readers per article, is infinitesimally small. To this, one might add
that esoteric authors not only do not expect or want to be paid for
their words, but they are so eager to reach the eyes and minds of their
tiny fellow-specialist readership that (3) they are often willing to
pay to do so, by purchasing and mailing reprints of their articles to
those who request copies (and some who do not); in some fields they
also pay page charges to accelerate the publication of their work.
Why are esoteric authors prepared to go to such lengths? Because for
them publication is a means to a much more indirect end than
remuneration for their words. The scholarly/scientific reward structure
looks more like this: (a) Publish a lot. (This pressure for quantity is
somewhat at odds with the real objective, which is to do and report
work of high quality, significant contributions to knowledge.) (b)
Publish work that makes an impact. (How often it is read and cited is
again a quantitative measure of that impact, but the real objective is
to make an impact on the minds of active fellow-scholars, on their
work, and hence on the future course of learned inquiry itself, to the
benefit of humanity as a whole.) (a) and (b) will then help advance
your career. And scholars and scientists, it must be recalled, are not
looking only to advance their careers: They wish to make a contribution
to human knowledge, and this depends not only on having their work
noticed, but on having it followed up and built upon by their
fellow-scholars. All this by way of explaining why they would publish
their words for free, and even pay to have them distributed all the
more widely and quickly.
The first step in getting the word to one's peers, however, is to
publish it at all, and in the Gutenberg age the only way to do this was
through the mediation of the slow and expensive medium of printing and
paper distribution. It was because of the high cost of this, the only
means of making one's ideas and findings public at all, that
esoteric authors have stood ready to go even farther than what has been
mentioned so far: They have been willing to make the "Faustian" bargain
of trading the copyright for their words in exchange for having them
published. From the publishers' standpoint, the bargain was eminently
fair: They asked for nothing more than they asked from trade authors,
which was the right to protect the product from theft, so costs could be
recovered and both author and publisher could make a fair profit. For
the trade author, this bargain was not Faustian, because both he and
his publisher stood to gain from it -- and to lose from theft. But the
need to pay a ticket at the door was the last thing a esoteric author
would have wanted to impose by way of a deterrent for his already
minuscule potential readership.
So for the esoteric author, there was always a conflict of interest
built into the act of publishing: One wants to get the words out there to
everyone who might be interested, but one agrees to erect a price-tag as
a barrier, to cover the costs (not one's own, but those of the
publisher) and a fair return (again not to oneself, but to the publisher
who had incurred the costs).
Now that all this has been spelled out, the news is: With the advent of
electronic publication, the Faustian era for esoteric authors is now
over. The reason is that the per-page cost -- if one reckons it
properly -- is so much lower for purely electronic publication that it
no longer makes sense to recover it on the subscriber model of trade
publication. It makes much more sense -- and matches much better the
indirect reward structure I've just described -- to recover those
costs (and a fair proportionate return) from those who actually gain
from the much broader scope of electronic scholarly publication:
authors, or, more specifically, (1) their universities, who benefit in
many ways from the the publications of their staff (in the UK not least
in the form of their rankings in the Research Assessment Exercises that
determine their level of funding), (2) their research funding bodies,
who fund the research not only so that it should be performed, but so
that it should be publicly reported, (3) learned societies, who
collectively benefit, both as authors and readers (as does society as a
whole), from a freely available learned literature, and (4) university
libraries, whose budgets will be perhaps the greatest immediate financial
beneficiaries of the end of the Faustian era, for they, as much as the
author, have been held tight in the grip of the inelastic demand for
the intellectual product of what had been the sole means of production
and distribution of esoteric knowledge in the Gutenberg/Faust era.
What will be the true per-page saving in the PostGutenberg era of purely
electronic publication? Paper publishers have been estimating that it
will only be 10-30% lower than paper-page costs, but their figures are
based on reckoning only what electronic processing can save if one
continues to do things as one did them in paper. Most categories of
expenses (e.g., not just paper, printing and distribution, but
marketing, advertising and fulfillment) vanish with purely
electronic publication (and of course overhead from lingering paper
operations should not be reckoned in either). The only inherent
expenses of purely electronic publication are those of (1) peer review
(which requires only editorial administration, because the peers [i.e.,
us] have always reviewed for free) and (2) editing (including
formatting, mark-up and archiving). My own estimate (based on
experience from editing both a paper journal,
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS), published by
Cambridge University Press http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/
and a purely electronic one,
PSYCOLOQUY http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/psyc.html
sponsored by the American Psychological Association,
http://www.apa.org/
a large learned society) is that the savings would be more
like 70-90%. Translated into annual page charges for even the most
prolific author, it makes much more sense to recover these costs in
advance from some strategic combination of the four sources mentioned
earlier, particularly in view of the enormous added value of the
electronic medium compared to the paper one.
It remains only to tally up these
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg
PostGutenberg values: If the world's
esoteric scholarly/scientific literature were available to everyone for
free in electronic form, the first benefit to the author would be the
great increase in the visibility, accessibility and hence the potential
impact of his work (1). This would of course also be a benefit to
all scholars when they are wearing their readers' rather than their
authors' hats (2). Some fear that such a literature would be
overwhelming and un-navigable, but stop and think: How do we currently
manage it in paper? If the entire corpus were transferred to the Net,
instead of our eyes and fingers and feet doing the walking to get to
the papers or to get the papers to us, electronic directories containing
everything could be searched using the kinds of keyword search already
used today in searching electronic databases that contain the titles
and abstracts (but not the articles) in the paper literature. Then, one
more click, and you have the paper itself! Or clever "knowbots"
(automatic search programmes) could be designed to go out instead of us
and look for papers fitting our profile of interests, leaving us even
more time to actually read what we want and to do our research, rather
than running after the literature.
Apart from free availability to all, there would be an advantage in
terms of speed (3), because although peer review and editing probably
cannot be speeded up much beyond their present rates, the time it takes
for an accepted, edited paper actually to go to press, appear, and reach
all the eyes and minds it is intended for is extremely slow
owing to of the very nature of the paper medium and its means of
distribution. Hand in hand with the greater speed of publication would
go its increase in scope (4): At its moment of publication a new
article in PSYCOLOQUY
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/psyc.html
is instantly available everywhere in the world,
to everyone with access to the Net. Electronic searchability of the
entire scholarly literature, hypertext links allowing readers to jump
to other relevant papers, and other electronic enhancements will add still
further value (5).
And, as always, necessity will be the mother of invention: The savings
in library budgets, plus other sources of support, can be used to
increase the already growing global access to the Net even in poorer
universities and countries: As with the minimal page charges to
authors, the benefits from the relatively small investment needed to
provide adequate access for scholars and scientists vastly outweighs
the costs. (UNESCO, under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Joshua
Lederberg, and other similar initiatives are underway to ensure global
electronic access to esoteric knowledge on a scale that the economics
of paper had made unthinkable.) And the general public, which is likewise
gaining greater access to the Net, also stands to benefit from the free
availability of the scholarly literature, especially in the biomedical
area.
But perhaps the greatest added value of the electronic medium has not
yet been mentioned:
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub
Interactive publication. The paper journal I edit,
Behavioral & Brain Sciences (BBS),
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
has an extremely high impact
factor (citation ratio) because, besides publishing articles, it also
publishes commentaries -- sometimes as many as 20 - 30 per article --
from specialists across disciplines and around the world, analysing,
amplifying, criticising and supplementing the target article. The
author responds to all the commentaries in the same issue. It is this
"open peer commentary" feature that has not only given
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
BBS its impact with its readership, but that has made it such a sought
after place to publish for authors. The reason is that this interactive
dimension is missing from conventional publication, even though it is a
natural and important aspect of learned inquiry. We write to influence
our fellow-scholars, and to be influenced in turn by them.
Peer commentary is expensive to provide in paper; nor does every
article merit that much attention. That's partly what peer review is
meant to do for BBS: to pick out that work for which all this attention
will be beneficial to the field as a whole, as well as to the author.
One of the critical features of peer commentary is that it must be
timely. One must strike while the iron is hot, otherwise the author has
moved on to other things. So in a paper journal, serial peer
commentary, appearing in issue after issue, would not be a possibility,
because the turnaround time would be too slow. BBS circulates the
article to 100 commentators as soon at is accepted (formerly this was
done by paper and mail exclusively; increasingly it is being done
electronically), and then the article, commentaries and response, with
tight deadlines, are all published in the same issue.
But is it only the 12-15 articles per year that BBS publishes that
would benefit from peer commentary? BBS's electronic
counterpart, PSYCOLOQUY http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/psyc.html
PSYCOLOQUY, offers peer commentary for ALL articles. Once
peer-reviewed, accepted, and published, all articles are open to
commentary, and the commentaries (and responses) are published rapidly,
to keep the momentum up. (And PSYCOLOQUY, thanks to an annual subsidy
from the http://www.apa.org/
American Psychological to Association, is free for all.)
This sort of rapid electronic interaction -- which I have dubbed
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting
"scholarly skywriting" -- can be implemented in many different ways; a
peer reviewed journal is only one of them. But skywriting is perhaps
the most revolutionary feature of electronic publication (6). It allows
authors to interact directly with their peers at a tempo that keeps
pace with the speed of thought (paper publication being hopelessly slow
for it, and spontaneous speech, as in a live symposium, being perhaps
too fast: the reflection and discipline of refereed Skywriting may well
be optimal, a form of scholarly interaction that was not possible
before the PostGutenberg era).
So what is the strategy for ushering in this era? It is a simple
subversive proposal that I would make to all scholars and scientists
right now:
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/
If from this day forward, everyone were to make available on
the Net, in publicly accessible archives on the World Wide Web, the
texts of all their current papers (and whichever past ones are still
sitting on their word processors' disks) then the transition to the
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg
PostGutenberg Galaxy would happen virtually overnight. Here is how this
would bring the current paper house of cards come tumbling down: (1)
Readers would quickly form the habit of accessing the free, globally
available electronic versions of articles, rather than the late,
remote, expensive paper ones. Having formed those habits and
expectations, they would never relinquish them again. (2) Publishers
would be encouraged to restructure themselves for the transfer of
cost-recovery to the much lower advance page-charge model rather than
the subscription model.
(Currently, publishers tend to experiment with what I think is a doomed
hybrid model, offering paper subscribers a paper plus an electronic
subscription for a bit more than the paper-alone subscription price, or
an electronic-only subscription for somewhat less than the paper price;
the hope is that this will provide a gradual transition to
electronic-only publication, if and when demand dictates it, but always
retaining the subscription model. I hope I have already given some
reasons why this scenario is not in the best interests of scholars, the
pursuit of knowledge, or the public, but if my subversive proposal were
followed, the inevitable would be fast-forwarded, the conflict of
interest at the core of the hybrid proposal (the now obsolete Faustian
bargain) would become immediately apparent, and publishers would
already feel the incentive to adapt in a more auspicious direction.
Otherwise, there is a danger that authors, editors and peer reviewers
may bolt and take matters into their own hands, creating
electronic-only journals unencumbered by the old trade model.)
Something like this is already happening in the Physics community,
where in four years one man, Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, has managed to bring all this to pass. Starting in 1991
with a proposal to exchange preprints electronically among 100 fellow
high-energy physicists, http://xxx.lanl.gov/
the remarkable global archive he created has already grown to encompass
virtually the entire current literature of high energy physics, general
relativity, condensed matter theory, nuclear theory, and astrophysics;
this is now past the half-way mark for the physics literature as a
whole, and there seems to be no turning back. 25,000 physicists
worldwide are accessing the archive 45,000 times a day, with 350 new
papers deposited per week. This is truly revolutionary, and when the
PostGutenberg history is written, Paul Ginsparg will be duly credited
with having set the inevitable firmly in motion. The Physics literature
still faces some potential crises, however, because all those papers in
Ginsparg's archive eventually appear in paper journals. It is the paper
publishers who pay for the peer review and the editing. Something
clearly has to be done to keep the Invisible Hand of peer review
intact, to preserve the quality of the literature. Perhaps when the
library revenue begins to show signs of dwindling, the publishers will
begin to recognise the virtues of the electronic-only, page-charge
model over the hybrid one...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I wish to thank
Ann Okerson http://www.cni.org/CNI.homepage.html
Paul Ginsparg http://xxx.lanl.gov/pg.html
and
Andrew Odlyzko ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z
for their valuable comments on early drafts of this paper.
I am especially indebted to Andrew for producing the abridged version
(with some improvements that generated a better rating by his style
checker) that appeared in THES.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Most papers from the last eight years are machine retrievable from
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html the Harnad public
e-print archive. See also the
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/
discussion archive for the Subversive Proposal encouraging all scholars
and scientists to create similar public archives for their articles.
This discussion will shortly appear as a book edited by Ann Okerson:
mailto:okerson@cni.org
http://www.cni.org/CNI.homepage.html
Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research
Communication. http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/
Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of
Physics). 8(4): 390-396.
Hargens, L.L. (1990) Variation in journal peer review systems: Possible
causes and consequences. Journal of the American Medical Association
263: 1348-1352.
Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.
Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in
scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific
knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.
Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science,
Technology and Human Values 10: 55 - 62.
Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A
difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.)
Nature 322: 24 - 5.
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343
(reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the
Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review
2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2
1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach
Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of
Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A.
Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research
Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and
in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg
Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the
American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for
Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub
Harnad, S. (1995a) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?
Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information
2(3) 1995)
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis
Harnad, S. (1995b) Implementing Peer Review on the Net:
Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals.
In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia:
The Agenda for the Year 2000. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.peer.review
Harnad, S., Steklis, H. D. & Lancaster, J. B. (eds.) (1976) Origins and
Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 280.
Hayes, P., Harnad, S., Perlis, D. & Block, N. (1992) Virtual Symposium
on Virtual Mind. Minds and Machines 2: 217-238.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad93.symb.anal.net.hayes
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
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