Electronic Journal Publishing: A Reader
Version 2.0
Published by INASP, 2001
ŠINASP 2001
http://www.inasp.info
Reproduced from LOGOS,
7/1 with kind permission from the editor
Sandra
M. Whisler
Prior to her appointment as Assistant Director for Electronic Publishing and Serials at the University of California Press in April 1994, Sandra Whisler spent more than twenty years in journals publishing at the University of Chicago Press, Springer Verlag New York and the University of California Press. She has been active in Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the SSP. She can be reached at smw@garnet.berkeley.edu.
I define electronic publishing as publishing activities that have as their end the distribution of knowledge by electronic means, not the use of electronic technologies to speed up or reduce the cost of print publication. Nor do I include in my definition the rapidly spreading use of World Wide Web home pages for innovative online marketing.
Discussions of electronic publishing often pose two extremes: either extravagant and sometimes fantastic predictions of a revolution that will transform the entire publishing industry in eighteen months or a deep sense of anxiety and foreboding on the part of those whose professional lives centre round print media. Neither conclusion is justified. In fact, the next ten years will be a time of transition, during which publishers and librarians will live in a dual paper-electronic world, in which "reader" and "user" will be increasingly used as synonyms.
Since a tour through all of electronic publishing - from computer games to the huge NEXIS (newspaper) and LEXIS (law references) databases and CD-ROM encyclopaedias - is beyond the scope of a single article, I shall concentrate the argument on professional and scholarly publishing (PSP). What is happening and what is about to happen in this sector will offer some illumination of trends in the whole spectrum of publishing. Electronic capabilities are uniquely suited to some scholarly enterprises, and PSP audiences are already widely familiar with the Internet. What scholarly associations, university presses and commercial academic publishers are doing, should do and should not do, has implications for other publishing sectors.
Twenty years will probably pass before PSP switches over to entirely electronic delivery of information, in spite of the fact that there are some disciplines, notably the physics community, who believe that this transition will occur much more rapidly. But even if the transition is slow and uneven, it will happen. Publishers who ignore electronic publishing do so at their peril.
What PSP publishers are facing is an increasingly complex and multi-layered publishing environment. Publishers will provide knowledge in a variety of print and electronic formats, depending on the nature of the materials, the audience, the needs of libraries, the unique contributions that electronic publishing can offer - and the economics of it all. Traditional publishing duties will be restructured as publishers produce single works in multiple formats. Work flow processes will change and the implementation of electronic production. Technologies and approaches will eliminate old jobs and create new ones. Electronic publishing also offers exciting opportunities to expand the audience for scholarly materials as well as to enhance the presentation of knowledge and to publish entirely new kinds of scholarship.
Our anxiety, our ignorance and our alienation from the often daunting technical jargon sometimes prevent publishers from seriously exploring the electronic future. This is a mistake for publishing professionals and a disservice to scholarship. To date, much of the material that has been published electronically falls at two extremes: good content presented without sufficient thought to format and delivery (sometimes characteristic of works mounted on the Internet by their authors): and sumptuous multimedia presentations and interfaces without sufficient depth of content (this applies to vast majority of non-bibliographic CD-ROMs).
Traditional publishers are professionals who understand both presentation and the need for genuine content. They have important contributions to make to electronic publishing:
First and foremost, the ability to identify superior scholarship and the resulting reputation for publishing quality. The peer review and validation provided by a quality imprint will be even more important in the electronic world than in the print world to help readers to be better able to sort out what's good from the huge mass of sometimes mediocre electronic materials now available.
Skill in matching presentation to content in ways that increase accessibility. Copy-editing, design, choice of format and fit content and format to market - all functions that publishers perform every day in the print world - are also needed in the electronic modes. The answers are different but the questions are the same: What format and approach will present authors' messages most accessibly to the audience, at a price that the audience can afford? If a system of scholarly information bypassing publishers and publishing functions were to come into being, the world would be poorer.
* Familiarity with scholars, both as authors and readers. What publishers already know about their customers can help to avoid the who-did-they-think-would-use-this? Mistakes that plague so many multimedia publications.
* Marketing expertise. The suggestion that marketing will disappear on the Internet, as Web crawlers and intelligent agents present their personalised lists of discoveries each morning, is naive. In the exceptionally noisy, overwhelmingly large world of the Internet, marketing will be different, but its function -to notify the appropriate audience of the existence of new work of high quality - will be more important than ever. The same is true of CD-ROM. In 1994, space on computer store shelves accommodated only one-fourth of the CD-ROM products on the market. Marketing and distribution savvy were survival issues for many companies. Whether online or on-shelf, marketing will continue to be a sine qua non in the publishing business.
Despite a lot of talk among
multimedia enthusiasts that content will drive the process, so far glitz and
technology have been consistently in control. PSP publishers, and indeed all
publishers, have the opportunity - and the challenge - to do electronic
publishing right. Only when they do this will online and stand-alone projects
fully demonstrate the potential of electronic publishing.
The very rapid pace of technological development - seen, for example, in the growth of the Internet or the installation of CD-ROM drives in homes - leads many to predict that the rate of change within publishing will be equally fast. I believe, however, that the transformation will happen very unevenly. Some academic disciplines (physics, for example), some sectors of society and some applications will develop much more quickly than others. Each enterprise will have to decide for itself its own pace and direction.
In planning the electronic future at the University of California Press, I work on the assumption that scholarly publishing will take twenty years to switch to a wholly digital mode. Nevertheless, the electronic revolution has to be seen as inevitable. The publishers' task is to prepare their staffs and their organisations to live in constant change during those transitional years. In an environment of harsh economic pressures and continually evolving technology, publishers must develop strategies that allow them to respond flexibly, creatively and rapidly. Format and publishing will vary not only from company to company, but from one project to the next in each company, according to the demands of content, audience and economics.
Titles published by University of California Press ten years from now are likely to fall into four groups:
1. Exclusively electronic titles
2.
About 15% to 20% of all publishing will be books and journals that will exist only in electronic formats, either published over the Internet or as stand-alone projects sold in units, probably as CD-ROM's. Both stand-alone and networked products will be characterised by a great need for speed of publication; by multimedia facets and interactivity; or by enhancement as parts of larger databases. Electronic-only products will include everything from multimedia CD-ROMs (which will take full advantage of visual and aural possibilities and target audiences beyond the academy) to electronic books and journals (including multimedia materials as large bandwidth capacities become more widely available) that will be available only over the Internet. Such online projects will earn revenue through a combination of institutional domain licensing (i.e., licenses to universities, associations and other organisations for unlimited use by their members) and on-the-spot sale of chapters and articles to individuals.
2. Print-only titles
About 10% to 20% of all titles will be books that will exist only in print. Most of them will be trade titles and perhaps textbooks - although how the textbook adoption market will develop is one of the great open questions of electronic publishing. Even some print-only titles, however, may have electronic supplements.
3. Multiple-format titles
The majority of our titles will be published full-text in both electronic and print formats, the print version being increasingly on demand (i.e., without inventory in the warehouse). Offering the same material in multiple formats to different audiences will ease the transition into wholly electronic modes, allowing the publishers to acquire expertise before abandoning print. However, the use of multiple formats will also require the re-engineering and management of our entire production process to eliminate inefficiencies and maximise flexibility. If this is not done, the overheads associated with each step or format will make the projects unprofitable.
How will such multiple formats work? UC Press's plans for publication of special interest for small-market books provide one example. As any publisher of such books (traditionally called monographs) knows, sales are collapsing as a result of the ongoing library budget crisis. The Press is developing a plan to publish such works as a combination of ultra-short-run printing for pre-release orders from libraries with subsequent on-demand printing, done either by the Press or by printing facilities in libraries and bookstores. These monographs will also be available online over the Internet, through domain licensing to libraries and through sale of chapters to individuals. The goal is to maximise both income and availability, while reducing the unit and inventory costs of the print editions.
Making such a combination successful will require rigid economy of handling, in peer review, copy reading and copy-editing, as well as absolutely standard design. To control overhead costs, such a multiple-format model demands strictly limiting the work that must be done to the digital file each time the material moves from one format to the next. To accomplish this, the Press is developing a work plan for implementing Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) coding as part of the electronic manuscript editing process. This will ensure that files are portable from one format to another with the least possible additional staff time.
The online "editions" of such multi-format titles will be available over the Internet as parts of discipline-focused databases. Such databases will comprise both frontlist and backlist titles and current and back volumes of journals. It is also likely that the Press, in collaboration with the university library or scholarly organization, will add related materials to these databases, such as primary source documents (including art and photographs) or out of print works.
4. Hybrid titles
These will be print publications with electronic supplements. For example, CD-ROMs or computer disks can either be bound into the backs of volumes or offered as materials from the Press Internet site. The Press has already begun work on a project that will offer a wealth of original source materials to scholars, online and without charge, to supplement the much more trade-oriented printed main text. MIT Press, among others, has already published books with CD-ROMs of images bound in the backs. These split formation formats will become more common as publishers become accustomed to dealing with electronic media and as the requirements of authors change in response to such opportunity.
Thus, in ten years' time, the Press
will be publishing electronic versions of the vast majority of its publications
in one of these four categories. The implications for staff development and the
re-engineering of work flow, scheduling and procedures are enormous. It will
not be possible to live in such a dual world with a small autonomous electronic
publishing division, while the rest of the house remains unchanged. If 80% of
the Press's titles are to appear electronically, it follows that most staff
must be not only familiar with, but fully competent in the use of, electronic
technologies. Investment therefore must cover not only equipment and software,
but staff training. This presents a particular challenge to non-profit organisations. Few university presses or scholarly
societies are spending even the 4% of revenues recommended for non-profit
investments in new technology, let alone the 8% average annual expenditure by
commercial firms. How to maintain the current print business while diverting
increasing staff time and equipment resources to electronic publishing, without
new sources of capital, is a major conundrum.
What is happening NOW? Is this all still just a dream? Faced with the need for more investment and lulled by the thought that the transition is just beginning, publishers can be tempted to say to themselves, "Oh, but there'll always be books," and postpone all things electronic. Instead, a cursory survey of PSP publishers reveals a wide assortment of not simply pilot projects, but fully developed products, often produced in partnership with outside organizations, in both stand-alone and online configurations.
The following networked projects are a sampling of what is currently going on (see the end note for a listing of URLs for these sites.) It is important to keep in mind that these are publisher-sponsored, fully peer-reviewed and edited undertakings developed within the confines of full-cost recovery models, unlike ostensibly free publications being mounted on the Internet by individual scholars.
* The SCAN project (Scholarship from California on the Net). This is the major online enterprise of the University of California Press. It currently consists of a 19th century studies database, of which domain-licensing to libraries will begin in 1996. Unit sales to individuals (of chapters or individual articles) will be offered by late 1997. The database will include current and back issues of Nineteenth Century Literature and a number of monographs and mid-list books in the field, together with a variety of original, source materials. In the following years, the database will be expanded and new databases in history, musicology and other humanities and the social sciences will be added. A full-scale operation, with a viable cost recovery mechanism, is foreseen by the turn of the century. SCAN is partially funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and is created in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Library, the UCLA Library and the UC Irvine Library.
* John Hopkins University Press is sponsoring Project Muse (see LOGOS 6/2). At least forty journals will be online within the next two years. Like SCAN, Project Muse will go first for domain licensing and then for sales to individuals. Again, like SCAN, partial funding has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, together with the National Endowment for the Humanities and in collaboration with the John Hopkins Library.
* MIT Press, working in collaboration with the MIT Library, is publishing two new journals in electronic form only: Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science and Journal of Functional and Logic Programming. These will be sold on subscription to institutions and individuals for online access. MIT is also planning to develop electronic services related to and expanding on print journals, such as the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.
* Scholarly societies are also moving quickly into online publishing. The On-line Computer Library Center, Inc in Ohio (OCLC) is currently publishing thirty-six journals online, including Physical Review Letters On-line, published in cooperation with the American Physical Society; Applied Physics Letters On-line, published in cooperation with the American Institute of Physics; and Electronic Letters On-line, published in cooperation with the Institute of Electrical Engineers.
* Among other initiatives: The
American Astronomical Society and the University of Chicago Press are mounting
the Astrophysical Journal Letter online. And five societies - the American
Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the Association of
American Geographers, the Ecological Society of America and the Oceanography
Society - are cooperating to publish a new, exclusively electronic journal
called Earth Interactions, which will include computer animation and other
visualization techniques. Leading commercial journal publishers such as
Elsevier and Springer are rapidly moving beyond their pilot projects. Elsevier,
for example, is offering electronic access to its full journal list from 1996
through CCLC.
Online PSP publishing to date remains largely focused on journals, although there are a few experiments at commercial sites like the On-line Book-store, as well as the sometimes substantial text samples appearing on Web sites. In contrast, a wide array of stand-alone projects are appearing, some of them quite profitably: For example
The American Society for Microbiology and the American Psychiatric Association have produced journals and standard reference works on CD-ROM. The majority of the sales have been not to libraries, but to individual professionals, who need the capacity for quick searching of databases and are prepared to pay for it. The University of California Press is offering Introduction to Attic Greek: An Electronic Workbook, for which it expects sales for class- room adoptions, from individuals and for site licensing to schools. Columbia University Press has had excellent success with the Grangers World of Poetry '95, selling for $600. Yale University Press is hard at work on the second edition of the Perseus Project, multi-media database in classics, and also reports substantial success with its multimedia interactive French language program, A la rencontre de Philippe/Meeting with Philippe. Princeton University Press is developing a number of CD-Roms, the most notable being a hypermedia version of The I Ching, with the full Wilhelm/Baynes text and some supplements. It will contain an elaborately cross-referenced textbase for both study and divination; engines for yarrow-stalk or coin generation (or direct entry) of hexagrams; indexing and filtering of commentary levels; help tools; study resources; a diary for reader note storage; text printing facilities; and browse functions for searching, viewing and reading the texts or commentaries. This digital publication should make the Bollingen I Ching far more accessible than its print counterpart.
Developments in trade publishing are better capitalized than those in PSP. There are several elaborate Web sites, with free access at the moment, but sufficiently well developed to show how they will work as income generators (see the end note for a list of URLs). An example is Macmillan USA's Information Super Library, not currently full-text, but demonstrating how full-text would function.
One of my favorite publisher sites is the Moon Books home page, with a complete hypermedia edition of The Big Island Handbook. Traditional trade book publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins and Times Warner are all creating stand-alone electronic lists. What is happening in PSP is not a parochial development, but part of a larger endeavor.
All of these developments do not signal the demise of the codex, any more than television signalled the end of radio. Early experience in this transition period seems to indicate that online access, even to full-text, often boosts sales of the print product - provided both are reasonably priced. Academic libraries often report that electronic products bring new users (especially undergraduates} to the publications (i.e., the electronic version, not the print version), actually expanding the user base. In the long run, provided publishers take advantage of the transition to gain skills and reorganize work flows, it won't really matter to them whether scholars prefer online, stand-alone or paper versions. Publishers will be offering them all. And for some kinds of materials, PSP publishers may be able to expand their market beyond their traditional scholarly constituency to undergraduates, public libraries and the educated general public.
There is also a possibility that PSP publishers will be able to continue the publication of specialized monographs, which has been their traditional mission - provided their production processes can be sufficiently streamlined and there is additional revenue from access to portions of the online full-text. It would amount to a kind of publisher-controlled electronic "document delivery". These are, of course, big "ifs".
A major concern for both authors and publishers during the transition period will be the protection of intellectual property. A vigorous program of user education, combined with mechanisms to make compliance easy, will be indispensable to effective monetary copyright protection. Widespread, low-level copying by individuals, like the widespread photocopying of print and the duplication of audio tapes, is to be expected but I believe that systematic abuse can largely be stemmed. To do so, however, publishers must first clearly assert copyright ownership. (In the SCAN project, for example, a discussion of what is and is not permissible appears as the first screen of any down-loaded document). Secondly, it is of paramount importance
to make it easy and cheap to do the right thing. Most people will comply relatively happily, if it is not too difficult to do so. By the end of '97, commercial transactions on the Internet will be secure. This should make it easy for publishers to charge a reasonable fee for downloading an article or chapter, and safe for the buyers to do so without risking the confidentiality of their charge card numbers. In most cases, readers will choose to pay the fee in order to obtain the fully authenticated copy, rather than run the intellectual risk of obtaining a corrupted version from a friend. The Copyright Clearance Center has a pilot project in electronic delivery of rights-cleared material. Copyright concerns won't go away, but the problem of protecting intellectual rights will not be so overwhelming as to freeze development of online publishing.
The strategic partnerships that publishers are undertaking with libraries, scholarly societies and with one another will, I believe, greatly enrich the whole art of publishing, beyond the success or failure of specific projects. Collaborating closely with individuals representing key markets can only enhance publishers' overall understanding of and responsiveness to those markets.
Publishers who regard themselves as electronic neophytes should subscribe to Internet World and Wired. They should also talk to colleagues who are knowledgeable about electronic publishing. The exposure to a unique approach to strategic thinking, included in the intensive "Mapping the Future of Information Commerce" seminar offered by North-west Consulting (617 654 0600 Boston MA, USA) can be very useful - and eye-opening. Talking with librarians about their visions of the future can also be instructive. Upgrading hardware and software and encouraging staff to spend time on the World Wide Web are investments that will surely pay off later. In every publishing house there are electronically adept employees who should be invited to work on some electronic project, provided they can be given relief from their other duties.
Even organisations that decide not to enter electronic publishing in the near future need to encourage management and staff to acquire expertise. The learning curve for the technologies is steep. It will be too late to acquire familiarity and expertise in the year in which the first electronic title is to be published. Publishers have vast experience in fitting comment to format and to market. Developing expertise in electronic media will complement that experience and make publishers' potential contributions to the world of electronic communication a reality.
SCAN project (Scholarship from
California on the Net): http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU:8080/scan/
Project Muse: http://muse.mse.jhu.edu/
MIT Press projects: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/
OCLC(Online Computer Library
Center, Inc) Electronic Journals Online: http://www.ref.oclc.org:2000/
Physical Review Letter Online: http://aps.org/Journals/PRL-online/
Applied Physics Letters Online: http://www.aip.org/epub/aplointro.htm/
Electronics Letters Online: http://www.iee.org.uk/publish/journals/profjrnl/eleclett.html
Astrophysical Journal Letters: http://www.aas.org/ApJ/
Earth Interactions: http://earth.agu.ord/kosmos/homepage.html
Introduction to Attic Greek: An
Electronic Handbook. gopher://gopherlink.berkeley.edu:3112/11/Classics%20Department/
Macmillan USA's Information SuperLibrary: http://www.mcp.com/
Moon Books: http://www.moon.com
Times/Warner: http://www.pathfinder.com/
Copyright Clearance Centre: http://www.openmarket.com/copyright/