Electronic Journal Publishing: A Reader
Version 2.0
Published by INASP, 2001
©INASP 2001
http://www.inasp.info
Getting Started in
Electronic Journal Publishing
Sally Morris
4th Edition
Why do electronic
publishing at all?
Publishing a journal electronically sounds very attractive.
There are a number of good reasons for doing so, but it does have disadvantages
too. Before committing yourself and your organisation
to the effort and expense involved, it is sensible to look carefully at both
the advantages and disadvantages. In the end, the decision will depend on what
your main objectives are, so it is important to be clear about why you are
publishing, or planning to publish, in the first place: what information you
want to disseminate, and to whom.
Electronic publishing is often considered to have four
great advantages over print: international reach, speed, additional
capabilities and lower cost. All of these are true up to a point.
International reach. It is of course true that
readers all over the world can in theory get hold of and read your journal
(provided that they have the necessary equipment and, for online journals,
Internet connections); you do not have to arrange for printed copies to be
mailed to different parts of the world, which can be both expensive and slow.
However, the real question is whether people will access your publication in
the first place. To do so, they will need to know of its existence (and, for an
online journal, its website address). Unless you carry out international
promotion for your journal, electronic availability will not necessarily make
any difference to its readership.
Speed of publication. As soon as
an article is ready for publication, it can be published; there is no need to
wait for it to be printed and bound. And as soon as it is published, it is
available to readers; there is no need to wait for it to arrive through the
post. What is more, you do not need to wait until you have enough articles to
make up a complete printed issue. You can, if you wish, publish articles individually
as soon as they are ready (or even, if you wish, in accepted but not yet
finally edited form). These time savings can be very helpful to authors,
particularly in fast-moving subjects such as the sciences, where priority of
publication is extremely important.
Many of the important processes of publication, however, will not in
themselves be speeded up if you want to produce a quality journal. If it is a
research journal, you will still need to arrange for peer review to be carried
out, and peer review and subsequent revision is often the most time-consuming
step between submission of an article and its eventual publication. Although
the transmission of papers to referees, and of their reports to the editorial
office, can done instantly by electronic means [1],
the referee's reading, thinking and writing of reports will take exactly the
same amount of time.
Similarly, the editorial processes are important if published articles
are to be consistently and accurately expressed, and clearly understood. Good
editing also makes it easier for readers to find their way around journals and
the individual articles. If you want to make an electronic journal even more useful
and interesting than a print one, additional work will be required such as
adding links, supplementary material, or 'non-printable' features such as
moving images or animations. It is not helpful to the scientific community if
publishers do not spend the time and effort required for careful editing. This
may, in fact, be the 'bottle-neck' which prevents you from publishing more
articles; unless you can afford to increase your editorial resources, you will
not be able to edit more than a certain number of articles without damaging the
quality.
Additional capabilities. Of all the
features which are possible with electronic journals, linking the ability to go directly from a citation in one article
to the article to which it refers - is the one most valued by authors and
readers. [2],
[3]
See section on Linking below for more details.
Electronic publication also makes it possible to include material which
you would not include in a print journal, either for space reasons or because
the material is difficult, costly or even impossible to print. Research
articles could be accompanied by the full data-sets from which the results were
reached ideally in a form which readers can manipulate for themselves, for
instance to compare with their own or others' data. Colour
illustrations may be prohibitively expensive in a printed journal, but present
no such problems in an electronic journal.
Moving images, sound, or animations could also be included, although
relatively few authors automatically think of providing such material at
present. You would also need to consider whether your readers (or, indeed, your
referees) would be likely to have the necessary software to make use of the
additional material. Non-textual files will also present the editorial office
with new challenges in working out how to check and, if necessary, correct such
material.
However, it is worth noting that respondents to a recent survey2
rated linking very highly, but all other additional features much less so. It
is probably therefore not worth spending a great deal of time and money on
these.
Reduced costs. If you decide to go without a print
edition at all, you will save all the costs associated with printing and
delivering a paper copy. However, for the relatively small print-run of a
typical academic journal, print and delivery costs represent a small proportion
of the overall costs, while all the editorial and 'first-copy' costs stay the
same. You will also have new costs associated with electronic publication
these are discussed in more detail below. In particular, the costs of data
handling and administration are usually increased. Tenopir
and King [4],
[5]
estimate, from statistics they have gathered, that the overall saving for a
journal with 500 subscribers is no more than 4%, though it could be as high as
25% if you are lucky enough to have 5000 subscribers. However, they acknowledge
that these figures may not take full account of the new computer-related costs,
which increase for larger circulation journals. Halliday
and Oppenheim [6],
[7]
have estimated in considerable detail the underlying costs which are not
reduced by electronic, as opposed to print, publication; they also try to
estimate the new, additional costs of electronic publication. [8],
[9]
If you decide to offer both print and electronic versions, your print
and delivery savings will of course be less, but your new, electronic, costs
will remain the same. Overall, Tenopir and King4
estimate that costs may increase by approximately 20%. This is therefore
an expensive option, although many publishers have found that their readers are
unwilling to go without print copies entirely, and they have therefore been
forced to take this route at least in the short term.
What really seems to happen, when readers use an electronic journal, is
that they print out the articles they want to read, so that they can carry them
around, annotate them, and perhaps file them2. Reading a complete
article from a screen is not something with which the majority of today's
readers are comfortable although it may be that the younger generation, more
accustomed to reading from a computer screen, may behave differently in future.
Thus in a way you are simply moving the cost of printing, from the publisher to
the reader.
The costs of administering an electronic version will be considerably
lower if you are able to make your journal available to everyone, free of
charge. This means that you will not need to have a system in place which
checks the identity of everyone trying to access your site, and responds in
different ways depending on whether or not the system recognises
them as a subscriber. Such a system is complicated and expensive, not only to
create but also to maintain; see the sections below on the Electronic
journal 'system', on Subscriptions administration and customer service,
and on What are the business models for recouping
some or all of your costs?
Convenience. One of the great advantages for
the user is that they can access the journal's content at their computer even,
if they are lucky enough, at their own desktop. They do not need to go to the
library, and risk finding that someone else is using the journal issue they
wanted. What is more, they can access the journal at any time, and not only
during library opening hours. Convenience was the most highly rated feature of
electronic journals in a recent ALPSP survey.2
Searchability. One of the
important benefits of an electronic journal is that it makes it much easier for
readers to search for articles. This is particularly true if you organise your system in such a way that users can search
for particular words or phrases. Even if this is not possible within your
system, it is very quick and easy for a reader to browse the tables of contents
of previous issues, for example to find an article which they can only remember
inexactly. This is far simpler than looking through every issue in turn on the
library shelf! Depending on the sophistication of your system, it may also be
possible for readers to jump directly to a particular section of the journal
(such as book reviews), or even to a particular section of an article (such as
'Materials and Methods' or 'Results').
Linking. One of the features which is most
attractive to both authors and readers2 is the ability to add live
hyperlinks within the journal material, either within your own publication(s)
such as links from the table of contents to the individual articles or to
other publications such as links to articles cited in the reference list.
Linking is becoming possible via secondary abstracting and indexing databases
such as MedLine; at a minimum, you would be able to
link to the abstract of the cited article, and depending on the other
publisher's policy, your readers may then be able to follow that link to the
full text if they wish. Developments such as the Digital Object Identifier
(DOI) [10],
[11],
[12],
[13]
are specifically designed to make this easy. A collaborative project called CrossRef [14]
uses the DOI technology to operate a system of managed and consistent linking
between citations and the cited articles in electronic journals; participation
is inexpensive for a publisher with only a few journals.
Archiving. This is another issue which
requires careful thought; it is worrying publishers and libraries the world
over. Print journals are relatively easy to archive, although they take up
space and may deteriorate over a long period of time, particularly if it is not
possible to store them in ideal conditions. Furthermore, a library which has
subscribed to a journal in the past will always have the copies to which it subscribed,
even if one day it has to cancel its subscription.
The same is not true for electronic publications. [15],
[16]
There is no easy way of archiving an electronic-only journal, particularly one
which is delivered online. Even if the archiving library makes backup files of
the journals, these may need to be updated over time, as technology changes.
Links to other sites one of the most attractive features of online journals
may become inactive due to the impermanence of World Wide Web addresses (URLs).
In some countries, national libraries are looking at how they can maintain
such an archive, but even they have not solved all the problems. Any form of
deposit of electronic journals (for example, with national libraries) will be
of no use unless the archive includes the necessary software to retrieve the
content. If you decide to publish an electronic-only journal, do consider
carefully how you will approach this problem; otherwise, there is a real danger
that the material you have published will not be available to future
scientists. A paper version does, of course, provide one solution. One
interesting project focusing on the archiving of journal articles is J-Stor. [17],
[18],
[19],
[20],
[21],
[22]
Much work is going on in various countries to explore the requirements
for legal deposit of electronic materials (e.g. with national libraries) in the
same way as is currently required for print. In addition to working out how to
preserve these materials adequately in perpetuity, questions of access also
have to be addressed in order to protect the businesses of the depositing
publishers. [23],
[24]
It is important to consider, in developing your licence
(see section on Licensing considerations below), what approach you will take to
providing access to material if the customer should cease to subscribe.
Librarians are anxious to ensure that, as with print, they continue to have
access rights to the material to which they subscribed. However, not all
publishers may wish (or be able, within their system) to continue to make
access available to previous material even when the library has stopped subscribing.
One alternative is to provide the customer with electronic files (possibly on
CD-ROM) when they cease to subscribe.
A more radical alternative, though, is to make older back issues
available to everyone free of charge. The Public Library of Science initiative [25]
urged authors and editors only to work with journals which made their back
issues freely available, in a particular type of archive, 6 months after publication.
Partly as an indirect result of this initiative, a growing number of publishers
[26]
are now making their back issues freely available, though usually on their own
site; the interval between initial publication and free access varies between 6
months and 3 years according to the pattern of use of older material in
different disciplines (and, of course, according to each publisher's
requirement for cost recovery).
Alternatives to formal journals. In certain
disciplines, researchers are accustomed to distributing their work to each
other informally before publication, in the form of 'preprints'. This is of
course much easier to achieve electronically (e.g. via e-mail) than it was in
print form. Electronic media also make it very much more feasible to store
these preprints in a searchable database (often institution-based). A preprints
database is very well established in physics and related disciplines. [27]
In addition, some writers are now urging authors to archive the final,
published version of their papers in publicly accessible databases (sometimes
known as eprint databases); this is a more acceptable
approach in subjects, such as medicine and the life sciences, where unrefereed material could be problematic. [28],
[29]
Software is being developed to make it easier to search for papers in more than
one preprints/eprints database at the same time. [30]
The problem with this, of course, is that it could undermine the very
existence of the journals in which the papers were originally published, since
the individual articles are available free of charge to anyone who wants them.
Of course, in preprint form the articles have not had the benefit of
peer-review, nor of the improvements which can be introduced by good editing.
Even more important, perhaps, is that they do not have the valuable 'branding'
which comes from inclusion in a recognised journal;
this enables the potential reader instantly to have some idea, not just of the
quality, but also of the subject matter and the editorial 'flavour'.
'Eprint' archives, however, do not have these
disadvantages, and could indeed threaten the survival of the journals on which
they draw unless an alternative way of recovering journal costs is found.
Some writers, [31],
[32]
believe that peer review and associated processes should be paid for by authors
(or their funding bodies) so that the peer-reviewed and edited versions of the articles
can be made available free, although others4 recognise
that it might be difficult for this to produce enough income for the publisher.
This is more difficult for researchers in the humanities, where research
funding is low, than in the sciences. It is also more difficult for authors
from less prosperous countries (indeed, many of the journals which do recover
their costs in this way waive the charges for such authors). A recently
launched alternative [33]
which looks promising is to ask institutions to pay, not for journal
subscriptions, but to make the output of all their researchers freely available
in 'open access' journals. Some publishers35 are also experimenting
with making the articles themselves free, but charging for related services
such as reviews.
Obviously, it is essential to have a viable business model for cost
recovery (or subsidy) before committing to an open access journal. However, the
benefits of open access to scholarship are so clear that the Open Society
Institute has recently launched a 3-year initiative which will financially
support the development of new business models and the creation (or conversion)
of open access journals. [34]
Uncertainties. Electronic (particularly
electronic-only) publication gives rise to a whole range of new questions, such
as: How do you cite a reference in an electronic-only journal? Or in a
preprints database? What do you give as the publication date for an article
which is published online before the print issue is available? There are more
fundamental issues, too, about what should count as 'publication' in an environment
of potentially continually updated documents; [35]
these are all difficult and, so far, unanswered questions.
If you decide to do it,
what decisions do you have to make?
If you reach the conclusion that electronic publication is the right
course of action for your journal, there are a number of choices which you will
need to think about.
Journal website, tables of contents, or
full text? In order for your journal or journals to have
an online presence, you will need to create an appropriate website (in fact, if
the publisher has its own website, this is a valuable marketing tool even if an
online version of the contents is not available). This should contain information
about the journal its coverage, the editor(s) and editorial board members,
how to subscribe and how to contribute an article; a picture of the journal
cover might be a useful addition. If online content is available the journal
website will also be the point of access for this.
You do not have to make the entire contents of the journal available
electronically. There can be considerable value in just making the tables of
contents available, possibly also including the article abstracts; this can be
done before the printed issue is even available. This will give readers the
advantage of being able to search quickly and easily for articles of interest.
If you decide, initially at least, only to provide the tables of contents
electronically, you will not need to think about charging for access and
restricting it to subscribers. It can be good publicity for your journal, and
your authors, to publicise the availability of the
contents listing of each new issue as widely and as quickly as possible.
You could also consider offering a service to readers whereby you email
them with details of the table of contents of the next issue; this is equally
possible whether or not the full text is available online. If you offer this
service to non-subscribers as well as subscribers, you will be able to identify
people who might be interested in subscribing in future.
All articles or just some.
You do not need to make the complete journal contents available electronically.
You might decide only to offer the research articles, while
including other material (editorials, book reviews, news, calendars of events,
correspondence) only in the print version. Or, if you decide to view the
electronic version primarily as publicity for the printed journal, you might
choose to provide selected articles, or a sample issue, to illustrate the
quality and variety of the journal's coverage.
Article by article, or issue by issue. If you do
decide to publish the entire journal online, you have the possibility of
publishing individual articles as soon as they are ready, rather than waiting
until you have a complete issue. Indeed, some publishers are now releasing
articles in their pre-publication form. [36]
Publication of an article as quickly as possible can be very helpful to the
author, particularly in fast-moving science disciplines where priority is
important. However, it is not necessarily helpful to readers; they may find it more
convenient to receive (whether electronically or on paper) a collection of
articles packaged together in a journal issue [37].
Article-by-article publication also raises some difficult issues: what is the
official 'publication date' if the electronic version is available before the
print version? How do you distinguish pre-publication versions, if they are not
quite the same as the published version? And how do you do your internal
financial calculations when is the pre-paid subscription revenue 'earned' by
publication?
Electronic journal 'system', as opposed to
just mounting files. It is perfectly possible just to create a
website which simply contains electronic files of the journal's content.
However, this will not be very attractive or usable for readers. At a minimum,
you will really need to provide some kind of hierarchical structure so that
readers can find their way around. At the very least, this structure will need
to identify the elements Journal, Issue, Article, to enable logical navigation.
Depending on the nature of your journal, you may want to distinguish different
types of article too. Better still would be to continue the structure within
articles (Abstract, Introduction, Materials and methods etc. not forgetting
References) so that readers can move directly to their chosen section. As
mentioned above, a search facility is also valuable. Once you have a large
number of articles available, the most sensible way to hold them is in some
kind of database to which your access system can 'point'.
If you decide to sell subscriptions to your electronic journal (or to
restrict free access, for example to members of a society or subscribers to the
print version) you will also need to have a system which enables users to
identify themselves so that the system can permit or prevent access as
appropriate.
A more sophisticated electronic journal could offer other things, such
as the ability for readers to bookmark or even annotate their favourite articles. E-mail alerting when a new article or
issue appears, possibly even selecting only those articles of interest to the
individual reader, is also possible (although it appears that too frequent
messages can be irritating to customers!). Readers could also post comments
relating to individual articles, which would then be available to everyone. [38],
[39],
[40]
Print and electronic, or electronic only. As mentioned
above, some costs can be saved by not having a printed version at all. However,
it is sensible to make sure that your existing or potential customers would be
happy with this; do some market research if possible. Bear in mind, too, the
archiving problem outlined above.
It makes a difference whether you are looking at an existing print
journal, or launching a completely new one. With an existing journal, you can
ask your customers whether they would welcome an electronic version, either
instead or as well; library subscribers may be concerned about the loss of a
print copy for their shelves, unless you can offer very substantial cost
savings. Authors may be less willing to submit their papers to a journal which
is only available in electronic form (this is partly because of the lack of
certainty about its long-term future accessibility and preservation); it is
always difficult to obtain good papers for a new and unknown journal, and this
may make the problem worse. On the other hand, with a new electronic-only
journal you can include features which are not possible in print; you can also
experiment with new cost-recovery models, such as charging authors or their
institutions rather than readers (see below).
If you do decide to publish both print and electronic versions, they may
well not be exactly the same. Quite apart from additional features in the
electronic version, it is impossible to guarantee that minor errors will not
creep in to the electronic files. It may be helpful to readers if you state clearly
that one or other version is definitive a growing number of publishers are
now making the electronic version the definitive one.
Possible extra features in electronic
version. Do your customers (both authors and readers) want
them? (Again, market research is the only way to find out.) Can you afford
them? Some will add to the cost of producing the electronic journal, not only
in technology but also in your time. Make sure that you are not wasting time
and money creating features which your customers do not value highly.
Singly or 'bundled'.
If you are fortunate enough to publish a number of journals, there may be
benefits in selling them as a single package (with or without the option for
customers to buy them separately if they choose). The evidence shows that usage
of titles which customers did not previously subscribe to can be unexpectedly
high. [41], [42] If you also
publish books or other content related to the journal's subject, an even richer
package could be created; you could also include links to material on other sites.
Another possibility would be to collaborate with one or more other publishers
to create a larger package.
Online or CD-ROM.
One tends to assume that electronic journals are online journals. However, in
some circumstances a CD-ROM may be more practical. This is particularly true
where there is not general availability of suitable computers, or most
importantly of Internet connections, which are of course dependent on a
widely available and reliable telephone system.
Of course, CD-ROM journals do have greater
limitations. You will still have to mail the CD-ROMs to your subscribers; it
will not be possible to publish article by article, and even a complete normal
journal issue will by no means fill a CD-ROM. However, they may be an
attractive option in some circumstances, although care should be taken with
format. Although CD-ROM format was standardised, [43] today there
is ever greater variety in CD-ROM formats (different speeds, data on both
sides, etc), and it is important to make sure that your CD-ROMs are in a
suitable format for the majority of your customers. CD-ROMs are also an
alternative way of providing a relatively stable medium-term archive, although
no one can be absolutely certain how long they will remain readable.
Do it yourself, or use someone else's
service. One way to avoid the costs of developing an
electronic journal service from scratch is to use one that someone else has
already developed. Learned societies (particularly the larger ones) may offer
their services for a charge; so may university presses and other publishers,
both non-profit and commercial, as well as some subscription agents
(although it is important to make sure that the
journal is also accessible to customers of other agents). Other organisations are specialising
in offering journal hosting services, sometimes specifically to smaller
not-for-profit societies. [44], [45], [46] However, your journal(s) available on the same site as a
number of other journals will very likely increase their visibility to
potential readers, and thus their use. With electronic journals, it does not
really matter where such a partner is based, although there may be language or
other reasons why you prefer to use someone in your own country, and day-to-day
communications will certainly be easier. Universities and other organisations might also be willing to include your
material on their website; bear in mind, however, that if they are not already
managing journals or similar content, their systems are unlikely to be suitable
without further (and costly) development.
There are a number of organisations
which have been set up specifically to assist with the electronic publication
of journals from developing countries, recognising
that the journals may have low international visibility and that their
publishers may be hampered by a lack of money and know-how. One such organisation is Bioline
Publications [47], [48], [49], [50], 13 which currently makes available 24 bioscience journals on
behalf of collaborating publishers, and has also launched 3 online-only
journals of its own [UPDATE]. Bioline has also
established the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development [51] to support
the electronic publication of journals published in developing countries.
Another is ExtraMED [52],
[53],
which produces 10 CD-ROMs a year containing the full page images of nearly 300
medical and health science journals from developing countries and promotes them
to libraries worldwide; similar services exist in science (ExtraSCI
UNESCO) and Agriculture (AgROM Extra - FAO). INASP
itself produces African Journals On-Line, which mounts the tables of contents
of numerous African-produced journals and sells photocopies of articles. [54]The
Open Society Institute runs the Center for Publishing Development in Budapest [55]
which helps to develop local publishing initiatives in Eastern Europe. Many
other such initatives are listed on the Liblicense [56]
and ALPSP [57]
websites. It is always difficult for learned societies, even in the West, to
find sufficient funding to support the development of their fellow publishers
elsewhere as much as they would wish; the idea of 'twinning' publishers from
more and less developed countries is being explored, for example by the
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers though its 'ALPSP
Partnership Project'.
The International Council of Scientific Unions has an excellent short
publication, Guidelines for Scientific Publishing [58],
which was updated in 1999. Another useful publication is Serial
Publications: guidelines for good practice in publishing journals, the
second edition of which (published in 2002) takes account of electronic journals.
[59]
There is also a helpful chapter on Electronic Publishing in Journal Publishing
by Page et al. [60]
In addition, in 2002 SPARC (an initiative whose mission is to reduce the costs
of journals to libraries) launched Gaining Independence, a guide for
those wishing to set up their own, reasonably priced, electronic journals. [61]
A brief checklist from ALPSP, Putting your journals online, is available
at http://www.inasp.info/psi/ejp/checklist.shtml
Sell it yourself, and/or go through
intermediaries. Making the journal available electronically is
only half the story. You then need to sell it, which includes not only making
the sale, but also arranging electronic access and managing whatever access
control mechanisms you have selected. In addition, you would be wise to
consider the licences which you want your customers
to have; unlike print journals, electronic journals provide users with a wide
range of possible uses, some of which you may not want to allow (see the
section on Licensing Considerations below). One possibility is to have
one or more intermediaries handle this side for you; many subscription agents
are now offering this service, for a fee, for electronic journals. This can
make very good sense, as most libraries already deal with subscription agents
for their printed journals. Furthermore, through some subscription agents'
systems, users can obtain access to all their electronic journals through a
single access mechanism; this is obviously preferable, for the user, to the
alternative of having to access a different website, probably using a different
password, for each journal. It is obviously easiest if the agent is also acting
as host for your journal; if they are not hosting the journal, you will need to
provide them with basic 'header' information tables of contents and,
preferably, abstracts in electronic form so that their users can search
these. Taking this route will increase your overall costs, since you will need
to pay the intermediary, but it is very likely also to increase the
accessibility, and thus use, of your journals.
What changes do you have
to make to your procedures?
Whether you decide to do it all yourself or not, electronic publication will
make it necessary to change the way you do things. [62],
[63]
It is important not to overlook this aspect.
Editorial.
The peer review, revision, and editing of articles, as already pointed out,
does not become any less important if they are to be published electronically.
In addition, editors may need to add (and verify) electronic links within the
article, within the journal, to other publications and to additional material.
An increasing number of authors though by no means all - are able to submit
their articles in electronic form, which can save some of the costs of
typesetting (or its electronic equivalent). You will only be able to reap the
benefits if you have a suitable computer in-house, so that the copy-editing and
preparation can be done electronically; if you have to pay your typesetter to
transfer your copy-editing and preparation markings to the electronic version,
you will see little or no saving. Article-by-article publication makes it
particularly important to have a good internal tracking system so that you know
what stage each article has reached; you may wish to add articles to your
database before they are finally released for publication. There are a number
of (fairly expensive) commercial systems which enable you to manage the
articles themselves, as well as information about them, at all stages in the
publication process. If you do not have one or more computers with sufficient
capability, you will need either to buy them or to subcontract the work to
someone who has publishing an electronic journal is more difficult, but not
impossible, without any electronic equipment of your own at all.
It is essential that, when acquiring copyright or the
right to publish from your journal contributors which you should always do
you make sure that you have secured the electronic rights. It is also important
to double-check that you or the author have obtained electronic rights for any
other material you wish to include, such as illustrations or quotations from
other publications. One sample of an appropriate agreement has been produced by
ALPSP. [64]
Production. The
production processes will obviously need to be different for an electronic (or,
indeed, a parallel print and electronic) journal. Files will need to be put
into an appropriate format such as PDF or HTML, so you, your staff or suppliers
will need to learn how to do this. PDF files reproduce the appearance of the
printed page; this can be less readable on screen, depending on the journal's
layout, but it is good for printing out. Your or your supplier will need
specialist software [65]
to create PDF files, and your readers will have to acquire special (though
free) software to read them. HTML files produce a screen-based layout, which
can be modified (as, unfortunately, can the text itself) by the user. It can be
easier to read on screen, but produces less attractive printouts which do not
mirror the print edition. An HTML file is also smaller than the corresponding
PDF, and therefore faster to download; this may be important if Internet
connections are slow.
The electronic files must be carefully checked for accuracy, as it is
surprisingly easy for errors to creep in when they are converted. Each file
will need appropriate 'labelling' at the very least
a file name or other identifier which enables you, and your system, to know
which article it is, and preferably a minimum set of 'metadata' such as journal
title, volume, issue, article title, article author(s), date of publication,
and identifier. If your processes have been less than systematic in the past,
this is the moment when you will really have to change that!
If you intend to publish parallel editions (e.g. print and online, print
and CD-ROM) it will make sense to prepare the content in a single
'medium-neutral' format which can then be converted into the different formats
required. SGML, and its close relative XML, is a particularly valuable format
to use for this purpose, but it is quite difficult to learn and to use
(although some commercial tools are available to simplify this). Even a simple
word-processing format, such as Microsoft Word, will take you a long way.
If you have chosen to publish article by article, your suppliers will
need to have a suitable system for tracking each article individually; this may
increase costs.
Marketing and promotion. Marketing,
in the true sense of discovering what your market wants and then providing it,
is every bit as necessary for electronic journals as it is for print journals.
Although it may seem tempting to miss out the step of conducting market
research, this is extremely unwise. In addition to talking to as many potential
authors and readers and possible, try to carry out systematic surveys by
questionnaire. If you see electronic publication as being a way to make your
journal more international, your market research should be international too.
This will cost money, but not as much as you could lose if your journal failed.
This process should not stop once your journal has been launched; there are
continual opportunities for change and improvement, in line with your authors'
and readers' changing needs. Questionnaires to both actual and potential
authors and subscribers are worth repeating every few years (if you can do this
by email, so much the better); customers who have cancelled their subscriptions
can be particularly valuable sources of information about what you are doing
wrong!
An electronic journal will not sell itself, any more than a print
journal. You will need to make sure that those who should be interested in
reading it, and writing for it, are aware of its existence. This is not simply
a matter of mailing a leaflet (indeed, many publishers report that this is
relatively ineffective). If you can obtain suitable lists of email addresses,
this is much cheaper than a postal mailing; be careful, however, about sending
'promotional' messages to email discussion lists, as this is considered
unprofessional, and may generate a strong negative reaction, although
straightforward information about journals is welcomed on many lists.
What is much more important is to make sure your journal is visible,
both nationally and internationally. Make sure that your journal is covered by
the major Internet search engines [66].
However, one of the most fundamental ways of ensuring visibility to your
community is to make sure your journal is included in secondary (abstracting
and indexing) databases. The major services used to be resistant to including
electronic-only journals, but this is changing. The most important of all is
ISI [67]),
although their acceptance procedures are quite stringent and the number of
journals they include is restricted [68].
However, you cannot include your journal in too many such databases; identify
as many as you can which are relevant to the subject matter. You may be asked
to provide a free subscription, but this is a very small price to pay. If you
can supply 'headers' bibliographic details and, ideally, abstracts - in
electronic form, so much the better. Some services will even pay for this, if
they find that it saves them time and money; unfortunately, however, there is
as yet no standardisation about the format in which
they require them. You should also make sure that your journal is listed in Ulrich's
International Periodicals Directory [69],
which is the major reference source.
It is particularly difficult for journals from the developing world to
achieve the visibility which results from inclusion in the major databases.
There may be concerns about the quality of refereeing, the absence of
high-profile writers, and the regularity of publication all of which problems
are in turn exacerbated by low visibility. Services such as ExtraMED,
ExtraSCI and AgROM Extra
(see below) are doing their best to counter this problem. A conference in Nanjing in November 1999 addressed this very issue. [70]
If your (or your partner's) system has such a capability, you may want
to offer free access for a short time, or to a certain amount of material, to
attract new subscribers. Indeed, many publishers have made their electronic
journals completely free to everyone for the first year or more. This can be a
good way both of attracting interest, and of getting feedback, although you
should be aware of the possibility that customers will resent being charged for
something which has hitherto been free; if you intend to introduce charges at a
later date, it is helpful to inform customers of this at the beginning.
Once a journal is made available online, the process of gathering
feedback from readers and authors can be much easier than for a printed title,
as the Internet allows for much easier two-way communications. Online feedback
forms, direct links to e-mail addresses, and discussion forums all permit much
more effective exchange of information.
Sales. Printed journals need little or
nothing in the way of salesmen. Libraries decide which journals they want, and
then choose their preferred channel for buying them. However, site licensing of
electronic journals (see section on Site Licences
below) does require detailed discussion and negotiation with each customer;
this is time-consuming, and if you decide to do it yourself you are likely to
need extra staff with the appropriate skills. The alternative is to have
someone else, such as a subscription agent, do it for you but you need to be
certain that you are willing for someone else to negotiate prices on your
behalf. Bear in mind that the price for a single library may represent
subscriptions for several journals; if libraries join together to form
consortia, this is even more likely to be the case.
Selling to library consortia (and other large customers) is a
particularly difficult and time-consuming process, and as mentioned above
the publisher with only a small number of journals can easily get squeezed out.
Initiatives are, however, being developed to help smaller publishers work
together to sell a single, larger collection of journals in these
circumstances. It may be beneficial to try to work with other publishers in
your own country or region to overcome these problems.
Subscriptions administration/customer
service. If you decide to restrict access in any way (for
example to paid or signed-up subscribers, subscribers to the print version, or
members of a society or association) you will need to administer this process,
providing passwords or other access controls to new users, disabling those
which have come to an end, and ensuring that your system can identify authorised users when they try to access the system. All of
this will entail even more complicated administration than is required for a
printed journal, and will require considerable technical expertise.
In some countries, the tax situation will be made more complicated if
you are selling electronic journals; they may attract tax where printed
journals do not. You will need expert local advice on this.
Customers do not need any help to use print journals; however, the
situation is different with electronic journals. Some customers will forget
their passwords and you will need to reissue them. Others will be unable to get
access even though apparently using the correct password. Even if you make your
journal available free of charge, you will find that some of your customers
have technical problems in accessing or using it. Thus you will need to provide
some kind of helpline for customer support, whether on the telephone, on email
or both; customers will become very frustrated if help is not available at the
exact moment when they need it, so the helpline should ideally be manned
full-time during working hours, even if not for 24 hours a day.
Of course, if you decide to use an intermediary to provide access to
your electronic journal, all of these problems will be taken care of, although
naturally at a cost.
It is impossible to put precise figures on the cost of publishing a
journal electronically; however, it is vitally important to work out your own
probable costs in full detail, and not to underestimate either the time or the
money that will be required.4, [71],
[72],
[73],
[74]
, [75],
[76]
Time. Someone will need to be responsible
for thinking through all the questions raised here, and making the necessary
decisions. This is not a one-time process; your electronic journal will need to
be continuously monitored and managed to an even greater extent than a print
journal. There will be additional complications to your editorial and
production processes, and new skills and procedures to be learned. The initial
creation of a suitable system will be extremely time-consuming, and its
maintenance and development will require continual commitment. If you do it
yourself, your subscriptions administration and customer support will also be
more labour-intensive.
Money. While, as we have seen, taking the
'electronic only' route will save costs on paper, printing, warehousing and despatch, these savings can very easily be offset by new
costs. While some have argued that it costs only a fraction of the cost of
establishing and running a printed journal, the experience of many traditional
publishers does not bear this out. The biggest single cost will be the
development of an appropriate journal system, with or without access controls
depending on whether or not you wish to charge for subscriptions. Like all
computer system developments, this is notoriously difficult to budget
accurately, and it would be unsafe to give any guidelines many people
recommend adding 50% to the number (and the time) you come up with! Deciding to
partner with an existing provider will make it possible to obtain definite
prices these are likely to be flat fees, rather than being based entirely on
a percentage of turnover, since most publishers experience low turnover in the
early years of electronic journals. Bear in mind, too, that this is not a
once-for-all investment; experience shows that such systems need continual
further development, which must be budgeted for.
You may need to allow for additional staff costs to cope with those
processes which become more complicated and more technical; people with
specialist computer skills are expensive everywhere!
It is impossible to give definite guideline figures, as there are so
many variables the number of articles received and published, the number of
subscribers, the number of other journals handled by the same system, not to
mention local variations in equipment, service and labour
costs. However, as mentioned above, Tenopir and King4
give some useful averages for a typical scholarly journal. They find that
overall savings are of the order of 4% for a 500-circulation journal, and that
costs are increased about 20% by parallel print and electronic publishing.
What are the business
models for recouping some or all of your costs?
Your organisation may not wish to recover any
of the costs, but rather may see the electronic publication of articles as a service
to the community. However, many others will want at least to recover their
costs, and possibly to provide additional income to fund other activities.
There are various different business models currently in use. Several of these
will only be applicable if you offer both electronic and print versions of the
journal. In all cases, your pricing decisions will need to be made with a view
to what usage pattern you want to achieve.
Electronic version free to everyone.
This will not, of course, enable you to recover any of your costs from users.
However, if it has the effect of increasing readership (which will only happen
if your marketing and promotion is effective), then it might make the journal
more attractive to advertisers or other sponsors. However, publishers have
found it impossible to fund specialist scientific journals by advertising
alone. As mentioned above, many publishers make their electronic journals free
of charge for an initial period for promotional purposes. The absence of any
need for access controls does reduce the costs of the journal system.
Author (or institution) charges. The idea
of making journals free to readers, and requiring authors to cover the costs
instead (for example, out of their research funding), has received much publicity
[77]
and is beginning to be tested. [78]
A new variant on this model is to charge institutions to make possible free
access to the output of all their researchers30. As mentioned
in the section on 'Alternatives to formal journals' above, the Open
Society Institute is actively engaged in supporting the development of financial
models which make it possible for journals, without reducing the value they
add, to make access freely available to all.32 Although free access
is obviously attractive to libraries and readers, it could be risky for a new
journal if the charge makes the journal less attractive for authors. You would
also need to calculate quite carefully (a) how much you needed to charge to
cover costs and (b) how much you could reasonably ask authors to pay. It will
obviously make a big difference if they are able to use part of their research
grants to pay the charges; if not, and the money has to come out of their own
pockets, then this approach is really a non-starter. One possibility is to use
author charges to reduce, rather than totally eliminate, subcriptions.3
Electronic version free to print
subscribers. You may want to do this either
permanently, or for an initial period as a form of promotion. It will require
an access control system, and you will need to assign a password or other form
of identification to every subscriber. Be careful not to increase the print
subscription price too steeply, or subscribers will feel with some
justification that they are being asked to cover the cost of the electronic
version, whether they want it or not; this could lose you print subscribers.
Electronic version sold to everyone
(price: same/more/less than print). You may
decide to set a separate subscription price for the electronic journal. If
there is a parallel print version, it is sensible to consider the relationship
of this price to the print subscription. Should it be the same (since
subscribers are buying the same content)? Or more (since they are getting
additional benefits and features)? Or less (since your costs are, or may be,
less)? You might want to offer a discount for combined print-plus-electronic
subscriptions.
Electronic version sold to print
subscribers for an extra charge. A number of publishers
are making an additional charge to include the electronic subscription; the
supplements range enormously widely, from 10% to 50% or more. An alternative is
to consider the print subscription to be the 'add-on', charging a substantially
reduced rate to those who subscribe to the electronic version. [79]
Individual subscriptions. The
majority of print journal subscription income usually comes from libraries and
institutions, but many publishers also sell at a lower price to individuals.
You might want to consider offering individual subscriptions to your electronic
journals, on one or more of the models outlined above. It is indeed arguable
that the real benefits of electronic journals (desktop access, additional
features and services) are more attractive to the individual reader than they
are to the library. However, you should also bear in mind that if you offer
library subscriptions, particularly on the basis of site licences,
individuals may already have good access to the electronic journal in any case
through their place of work. On the other hand, low-priced individual
subscriptions may be the most practical way of permitting users to access the
journal when they are not at their place of work. If you offer more than one
kind of electronic subscriptions, and if the privileges or permitted uses
differ, remember that your system will need to be able to distinguish the
different kinds of subscriber at the point when they access the system.
Member subscriptions. For those
societies and associations which get much of their income from membership
subscriptions, electronic journals can present something of a problem. If
members see access to their own personal copy of the journal as one of the main
benefits of membership, and if they now have access at their own desk through a
library subscription at their place of work, there is a risk that they will be
less inclined to continue their society membership. Society and association
publishers will need to think carefully about this, perhaps offering additional
electronic benefits or services only to members.
Single article sales. It is often
argued that, since a given reader will only be interested in some articles, it
would be better if he or she could buy those articles separately. While the
costs of administering such a system might be prohibitive in the print
environment, it is in principle much easier electronically, although the
publisher does need a suitable journal system which can deliver individual
articles and collect payment, whether by invoice or by credit card. One of the
problems of this system is that the money to buy journal articles is usually in
the hands of the university or other institution, and not the individual
reader. Publishers have feared that single article sales could reduce the
demand for subscriptions, but in fact studies so far do not bear this out if
anything, this seems to tap an additional source of revenue. [80]
However, quite apart from any possibility that the publisher might receive less
money overall, that money would flow in the form of many small transactions
(which are more costly to handle), and over the course of the year rather than
in advance in the form of a subscription.
Site licences.
Universities, companies and other institutional journal subscribers are always
very interested in obtaining site-wide access to electronic materials. Access
which is only possible from one or more specified computer terminals in the
library is very much less attractive. It is therefore a good idea to work out a
licensing policy, and an access system, which permits this. Defining the 'site'
may be quite difficult, particularly for a multi-site organisation
such as a large (possibly international) company. Pricing is a particular
problem, since organisations vary greatly in size and
in the potential or actual number of users. If you simply have a price based on
the print subscription price, then large and small organisations
will pay exactly the same, while at the same time none of them will need
multiple subscriptions so you may end up losing revenue. Some method of
pricing based on numbers of users might be more equitable, although it will be
more complicated to work out the appropriate price for any given customer.
Different publishers have looked at the funding of the institution, the total
number of faculty and students, or just the numbers in the most relevant
department(s). In most cases, publishers have found it simplest to establish a
relatively small number of 'price bands' based on these measures.
Consortium licences. It is
becoming increasingly common for institutions, particularly universities, to
band together in order to make better use of their limited budgets, and to
share the availability of the materials to which they subscribe. This can be a
very effective way of getting your journal content to a much larger community,
while still only necessitating a single negotiation. Combined institutions
however make very powerful negotiators, and you need to be careful to make the
right pricing decisions and not to allow yourself unintentionally to do
business at a loss. It is also difficult for a publisher with only one or a
small number of journals to sell to large customers and consortia and equally
difficult for the customer. The process is no less time-consuming for one
journal than for a hundred, and it requires specialist skills and knowledge.
Some organisations are trying to act on behalf of
many small publishers to overcome this problem. [81]
As mentioned above, the Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers is also investigating the creation of a single 'package' of journals
from many of its smaller members.
When you sell a printed journal, it is fairly clear
and well understood what your customers are and are not permitted to do with
the material. However, this is much less obvious in the electronic environment
and it is sensible to draw up a statement of what customers may and may not do,
which they will be asked to agree to. This may happen at two levels (or even
both). The individual user may be presented with a short summary on screen of
what is permitted and forbidden, and you might even want so to configure your
system that they had to click on a button marked 'I agree' before they could go
any further. The subscribing institution might be offered a more detailed
printed licence, which they would be asked to sign.
The latter approach does allow for a certain amount of negotiation if
necessary, although obviously you would wish to design your licence
so that it was acceptable to most of your customers without involving both them
and you in the time and cost of individual negotiation.
Some of your terms and conditions of use would depend
on whether or not the electronic version is free or charged-for, but others
would be applicable in any case. You would undoubtedly want to permit users to
search, retrieve, and print articles from the journal; you might or might not
also allow them to save individual articles electronically on their own
computers. You should think about the best policy on allowing users to re-send
articles, particularly electronically, to other people outside the subscribing
institution a number of publishers do allow this on a small-scale, personal
basis. It is unlikely that you would want users to sell articles or
redistribute them systematically on a large scale, or to mount all or even any
of the content on other web sites.
While, particularly in the case of a journal for which
a charge is made, you will probably want a signature or other indication of
acceptance of the terms and conditions, the use of electronic means to enforce
them is unlikely to make economic sense as the applicable technologies are
still expensive. Within the academic and scientific communities, a culture of
trust and honesty generally prevails.
Some very useful work has been done to produce 'model' licences, or licence frameworks,
which will help you to devise a suitable licence for
your own journals. All have been produced in discussion between publishers and
customers, and thus try to address the concerns of both [82].
While it is unwise to use any of them as they stand, without considering
carefully the implications of the various alternatives they present, they may
save you a great deal of time in working out appropriate wording, and they will
also help you to make sure that you don't leave anything out of your licence. One such example was
devised in the UK by a group of university librarians and publishers. [83] The LibLicense site [84] also
provides much useful information about licensing and licences,
and allows you to sign up to an interesting discussion list. There are
also a variety of sets of guidelines issued by universities and others, on what
to look for in a licence.[85] If you can
avoid writing your own licence from scratch, do so:
use all the material at your disposal to incorporate useful wording from
elsewhere. Many of the documents referred to are made freely available for just
this purpose.
Some publishers have stopped requiring their customers
to sign a licence at all instead, they have a clear
statement on the journal site of what is and is not permitted. So far, no
problems have been reported with this approach, and of course it saves everyone
a great deal of time and expense. [86], [87]
All of this is not intended to put you off publishing
an electronic journal; it may very well be the best way of achieving your
objectives. If, after weighing up all the advantages and disadvantages, you
decide to go ahead with electronic publication, it is hoped that this brief
introduction, and the plentiful information contained in the Reader, will give
you the best possible chance of making your journal a great success.
Scholarly e-publishing bibliography http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
(6-5-02)
Scholarly e-publishing links http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepr.html
(6-5-02)
Subject index to literature on electronic sources of
information http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUB_INT.HTM
(6-5-02)
Thanks are due to many friends and colleagues who have shared their
knowledge and experience with me over the years. In particular, I would like to
thank Cliff Morgan, Don King, and Andrea Powell for their constructive input to
this chapter.