Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell, eds.
Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, June 1995, 250 p.
ISBN 0-918006-26-0
Reviewed by Mark Magennis
To appear in: The Informer, the quarterly newsletter of the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG).
This is a very strange book. It is made up entirely of email messages. Subtitled "An internet discussion about scientific and scholarly journals and their future", it records a recent nine month fragment of a continuing discussion about the reporting of scientific research in the electronic era. Since this debate is being carried out mostly via email discussion lists, it makes a lot of sense to look into these email exchanges to see what's being discussed.
What is being discussed is the inevitable move of publishing from paper to electronic media and the opportunities this presents for radical change in the way scientific research results are distributed and accessed. The starting point was a call for collective action by the scientific research community to force publishers to adopt a new publishing model. This call was made in a message posted to an email discussion list last June by Stevan Harnad, Professor of Psychology at the University of Southampton and editor of Psycoloquy, one of the first electronic-only peer-reviewed scientific journals. Harnad's "subversive proposal" aimed at ensuring future published research would be available completely free of charge. Being immediately appealing to most people outside of the publishing industry, this proposal generated an enthusiastic response from many sides and the discussion began about how to realise it and whether it would work. But this was no mere utopianism from the anti-capitalist cyber-warrior community. The ensuing discussion was, and continues to be, both lively and informed.
Harnad believes that the results of scholarly scientific research should be freely available to all but that authors have hitherto been forced into a "Faustian bargain" with publishers in which they agree to erect a price tag as a barrier between their work and its intended audience. According to Harnad, this Faustian bargain, made necessary by the economics of traditional paper publishing, is no longer appropriate. Instead, Harnad believes it is time to adopt a new model, in which readers pay nothing for electronic access and the much-reduced costs are covered by authors, their institutions, learned societies and governments. However, publishers are not likely to adopt this new arrangement by their own volition so they will have to be forced into it. Harnad's proposal is that all research scientists, from this day on, should make all their research papers publicly available via ftp as unrefereed preprints prior to publishing. If this were to happen, so the argument goes, then when the refereed paper is finally published in a journal, the author can just replace the preprint with the refereed reprint and no-one will buy the journal. Publishers will then be forced to restructure their activities to stop charging readers money for access but to charge authors for preparation and distribution instead. If they don't then someone else inevitably will, and the subversion will be complete.
Although this subversive proposal is the starting point of the discussion, it covers many of the issues that are relevant to anyone involved in publishing or scholarly research.
So, how readable is a book of email messages? To anyone who is used to following mailing list discussions this book will be no problem, since the transformation from email to print has been carried out with a minimum of interference. Only a few small irrelevancies have been deleted, the layout has been slightly improved for readability and temporal ordering has been strictly adhered to so that reading the printed version is easier than reading the real thing. The email look and feel has been maintained even to the point of keeping the asterisks used for *emphasis*.
The text has been partitioned into chapters which is an interesting concept in the circumstances. In a normal text book chapters would delimit topics but the chronological ordering of email contributions would seem to make this impossible. However, short chapters such as "E-Journal costs and editorial costs" and "Journal publishing systems and models" do seem to form coherent enough foci so that the reader can decide on their area of interest and jump in with a reasonable chance of knowing what to expect. Where this falls down is with chapters such as "A researcher's perspective" and "A librarian's view from Europe" which really only serve as convenient headings for short paragraphs explaining what is discussed in those sections. As a result, the contents page is like a collection of abstracts, each describing a bundle of four or five messages and each with an occasionally gratuitous title. That this works at all is largely due to the nature of the contributions, many of which are mini-essays keeping to a specific subject and some of which actually are published or pre-published research papers.
The content of the discussion is sufficiently focused and intelligent to be an interesting read even in start-to-finish mode. After the subversive proposal itself the discussion covers questions of strategy and feasibility before it begins to broaden as participants from varied backgrounds join in, each with their own perspectives. Issues subsequently discussed include the roles of learned societies, academic libraries, academic institutions and the journal publishing industry itself. A great deal of time is spent on various aspects of cost, including the central and continuing 70/30 debate on whether electronic publishing saves 70% of the costs of paper publishing, as Harnad and others believe, or only 30%, as publishers claim. There is also a healthy amount of basic discussion on what purpose publishing serves and how the very nature of scientific research and its reporting can change and benefit from the opportunities provided by computer-based methods of information exchange.
Practical and theoretical issues are covered in equal measure and a good deal of what is written comes direct from the participants' experiences of publishing, editing, running libraries or setting up E-Journals.
So is it worth buying this book? It isn't the last word on any of the issues it covers, neither does it attempt to be complete in its coverage of any particular issue like a standard text book might. The debate in all the areas covered is still raging on those same discussion lists. However, for anyone interested in the costs of information access, the future of publishing, and particularly the future of scientific research, this book represents a lively and simulating starting point and I would recommend it.
The debate format is refreshing and continually reveals the biases and the ignorances which are a part of us all. It is perhaps this which makes it so stimulating to read. On many occasions I would find myself whole-heartedly going along with the author of a message only to find their arguments shot down in flames in the very next message. This fosters a healthy scepticism and a sense of perspective and reveals the contributions for what they are, not immutable facts but only viewpoints.
The main strength of this book reflects the strengths of email and bulletin board discussion. It throws together a wide range of current ideas and perspectives and reports on a genuine debate of a sort that rarely appears within the pages of a book or journal. However, it does so in a way that improves the readability somewhat and means that you can carry it with you on the train or read it propped up in bed with a cup of cocoa (I don't have a laptop)! The downside is that it is not as malleable as electronic files and that there is an inevitable delay between the appearance of the ideas and the appearance of the book - up to a year for the early postings. The fact that it is a book made of paper rather than the original email on a computer screen and that, in some ways, the book is more desirable than the email, is its great irony. Whilst reading this book I found my interest was captured as much by its form as by its content.
I hate to say it, because everyone does, but I was reminded of Marshall McLuhan's great quote "The medium is the message". It really fits in this case. Here we have a paper publication, reporting on the imminent demise of paper publishing and successfully illustrating the benefits of the electronic communication of ideas but doing it in some ways better than the electronic medium itself. As I said at the beginning, this is a very strange book.
To order a copy, contact:
Patricia Brennan
Information Services Coordinator
Association of Research Libraries
21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800
Washington DC 20036, U.S.A.
Tel: 202-296-2296
Fax: 202-872-0884
Email: patricia@cni.org
Cost is US$20 + US$7 p&p. Alternatively, the raw source files from which the Subversive Book is derived can be downloaded via ftp from ftp.princeton.edu in the directory ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal
Mark Magennis