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June, 1995 _EJournal_ Volume 5 Number 1 ISSN 1054-1055
There are 877 lines in this issue.
An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
2928 Subscribers in 37 Countries
University at Albany, State University of New York
EJOURNAL@albany.edu
CONTENTS: [This is line 19]
STEVAN HARNAD'S "SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL": [Begins at line 63]
Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship
by Doug Brent,
University of Calgary
Editorial Comment [Begins at line 688]
E-Publishing and Quality Control
Notice [Begins at line 758]
Cybernetics in Vienna, April 1996
Note [Begins at line 769]
About David Coniam's "Literacy for the
Next Generation ..." in V2N2
Information about _EJournal_ - [Begins at line 786]
About Subscriptions and Back Issues
About Supplements to Previous Texts
About _EJournal_
People [Begins at line 838]
Board of Advisors
Consulting Editors
*************************************************************************
*****************************************************************
* This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright *
* 1995 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away *
* the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and *
* all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged *
* authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany *
* all distribution of _EJournal_. *
*****************************************************************
======================================================================
[ I have managed to connect with the URLs mentioned in this
issue. Ed.]
STEVAN HARNAD'S "SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL": [l. 63]
Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship
A Summary and Analysis
1. Introduction
Many readers interested in electronic publishing will know of Stevan
Harnad, pioneering publisher of _Psycoloquy_, one of the first
peer-reviewed, all-electronic journals. In numerous talks and
articles (Harnad 1990; Harnad 1991; Harnad 1992; Harnad 1995a) he
has argued that electronic publishing is the logical way to cope
with the spiraling costs and glacial speed of print publication. In
order to save the entire scholarly industry from collapsing under
the burden of its own ballooning costs, he urges the scholarly
community to abandon its current "papyrocentric" attitudes and "take
to the skies."
Recently, Harnad precipitated a long, lively, provocative, and only
occasionally acrimonious electronic discussion among some of the key
players in the electronic publishing field. (The discussion is
archived for electronic retrieval at:
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/
and is being published as a hardcopy collection edited by Ann
Okerson and James O'Donnell (see references). He provoked this
discussion by circulating what he called a "subversive proposal" to
force the publishing industry to better serve the scholarly
community. Like most such discussions, this one follows many
different threads, recycles back into itself, and sometimes almost
disappears in the tangle of embedded messages and replies typical of
electronic polylog. But in the course of this convoluted exchange
the participants explore exhaustively many of the most important
issues concerning the future of scholarly publishing.
In the present essay I do not presume to offer a wholly new
contribution to the debate. Rather, I will first summarize Harnad's
radical vision for the future of electronic publishing, and then
present some of the main pro and con arguments from the ensuing
discussion of this radical vision. I will also summarize some of
the more interesting side arguments regarding the economics of the
Internet in general. Finally, I will end with some personal
analysis of the debate and some observations about electronic
publishing.
2. The Subversive Proposal [l. 108]
As I mentioned above, Harnad and others have long maintained that
much or all of the future of scholarly publishing lies in
transferring scholarly research to the internet: what he calls
"scholarly skywriting." Internet publication not only eliminates
much of the cost of publishing, but also allows for an extremely
quick turnaround of articles and responses to them. This quick
turnaround is, of course, especially important in the sciences,
where ideas become stale within weeks or even days. But Harnad
argues for more than timely presentation of ideas. He argues that
in the electronic world, *presentation* of ideas as lapidary product
of thought can be replaced by in-process texts that participate in
the *development* of thought. The process is more akin to oral
dialogue than to electronic representations of finished texts.
Absolutely fundamental to Harnad's argument is the distinction
between what he calls the "trade model" of publishing and "esoteric"
publishing. "Esoteric" has come to mean "obscure" or "difficult for
the lay audience to understand," a popular meaning that perhaps
makes Harnad's choice of terms somewhat unfortunate. However,
Harnad is fond of presenting the full dictionary definition of the
term as follows:
esoteric 213 aj .es-*-'ter-ik
LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN]
1 a aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
1 b aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
2 a aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL] <an ~ purpose>
esoterically 21313 av -i-k(*-)l{e-}
(Harnad 1995)
According to this definition, esoteric publishing is obscure to the
lay audience only as a side-effect of the fact that it is aimed at a
very small circle of readers. This circle can range from several
thousand in "mainstream" disciplines to a handful in the more
specialized sub-subdisciplines of science. Opposed to this form of
publishing is "trade" publishing, which because it is designed to
make money has to appeal to a reasonably large audience.
This has other important implications. Trade publication must
obviously be protected by copyright; if anyone could copy trade
works, publishers could not make money. In other words, trade
publication requires *as an essential condition of its being* that
access be restricted. This "pay-to-see" model applies even to
highly subsidized academic journals, which must nonetheless receive
*some* subscription revenue in order to stay afloat. The costs of
paper publication require a predictable revenue flow.
A need for predictable revenue offers little problem for, say,
established novelists, who want to make money from the sale of their
books. However, such a model-- where access is by necessity
*restricted* --is exactly antithetical to scholarly work. Scholars
are paid by their institutions and by granting agencies in direct
proportion to their scholarly output and reputation. This in turn
is closely linked to readership. The more people who read, respond
to, and build on a scholar's work, the better off she is, not only
in terms of the intangible satisfaction of having made a difference,
but also financially. The "consumers" of scholarly publishing, in
the sense of the people who actually derive benefit from it, are not
the readers but the writers. [l. 171]
Scholars have consented to having their works published and sold in
trade format simply because there was no other way to get their
ideas in circulation. Harnad repeatedly calls this arrangement a
"Faustian bargain." This bargain is not necessarily motivated by
the greed of individual publishers, an allegation that many have
read into Harnad's comments but which I am convinced is a
misinterpretation. It is simply a structural constraint of the
medium. Yet the term "Faustian" certainly suggests that the union
between scholarly production and a capitalist economy is a
necessity, not a virtue. As Harnad puts it,
Both the trade author and the esoteric author had to be
prepared to make a Faustian bargain with the paper publisher
(who was not, by the way, the devil either, but likewise a
victim of the bargain; the only devil would have been the
Blind Watchmaker who designed our planet and its means of
publication until the advent of the electronic publication
era). (Harnad, 1995b)
Since the demise of monastic scriptoria this relationship has been
the only game in town.
Electronic publication obviously provides an alternative to this
bargain. Yet electronic publication has been slow in coming and
slower in meeting acceptance. Many on-line journals are nothing
more than mirrors of paper journals, which continue to be the main
conduits for academic knowledge and associated academic rewards.
Trade publishers are obviously in no hurry to move to electronic
publishing because it is difficult to see how to make any money at
it. Harnad's "subversive proposal" suggests that scholars not wait
for the publishing industry to ooze slowly onto the net. Taking his
cue from Paul Ginsparg's incredibly successful electronic archive
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
which reportedly receives 45,000 hits per day (Harnad 1995a; see
also Stix 1994), Harnad recommends that we leave the publishing
industry behind and take to the skies ourselves:
If every esoteric author in the world this very day
established a globally accessible local ftp archive for every
piece of esoteric writing he did from this day forward, the
long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely
electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow
suit almost immediately. (Harnad 1995a) [l. 218]
This archive would begin with preprints, as Ginsparg's does.
However, as soon as a work was published in "standard" format,
authors would replace the preprint version with the published
version. The trade publication model would immediately become
untenable for esoteric publication. Publishers would be forced to
figure out a way to co-operate with scholarly skywriting or abandon
it altogether, making their profits only by publishing non-scholarly
works for which there is high demand. Thus scholarly preprints
would "break down the doors" for fully refereed publication in
electronic format (e-print.06). Scholars and scholarly electronic
journals, meanwhile, would be totally supported as they are
partially supported now, by subsidy rather than by market revenues.
Others, including _EJournal_, have been championing electronic
publication for years. What is particularly radical about Harnad's
proposal is his recommendation of direct action on the part of the
scholarly community, action that would end the hegemony of the
publishing industry. In a sense, he has declared war on the
industry that until now has been the major conduit for academics'
only "product"-- scholarship.
3. The Debate about the Proposal
The long intertwining threads of debate spawned by this proposal can
be grouped into several categories. Many of the discussions are
technical in nature, having to do with technical standards,
centralized versus distributed sites, etc. I will not attempt to
summarize these issues here. However, I will try to provide a
sketch of the controversy in four main areas: publishing costs,
network costs, quality control, and stewardship.
3.1. Publishing Costs
An important plank in Harnad's platform is his assertion that
scholarly writing on the net is cheap enough that it does not
require a trade model for support. Harnad adamantly insists that
electronic journals can be produced for 25% of the cost of paper
journals. Some scholars, such as Lorrin Garson of the American
Chemical Association, disagree. Garson argues that electronic
publication will still cost at least 75% of the cost of paper
publication because only a fraction of the cost of a paper journal
actually goes into physical reproduction and distribution. The rest
is "first-copy" cost, which includes the labour of editing, setting
up tables, proofreading, etc. (Note to Stevan Harnad, vpieg-l, 29
June 1994).
[l. 265]
Harnad defends his figure by pointing out that many of the tools
needed to set up charts and tables are currently available to
authors and that authors need no longer pay publishers to do this
work for them. Powerful public-domain search tools will make other
services provided by publishers, such as indexing, equally obsolete.
Quality control, the main remaining cost of publication, is usually
handled by editors and reviewers who perform their task as part of
their scholarly mandate, not for immediate financial reward.
Andrew Odlyzko (appropriately, a mathematician), supports Harnad's
argument by calculating that, although the average article in
Mathematics costs about $20,000 to *author* (the total cost of
supporting a researcher divided by average output of articles), if
produced electronically it would only cost about $4000 to *publish*
(e-print.15; see also Odlyzko 1994). By re-engineering the
publishing enterprise to eliminate many layers of now-unnecessary
specialists, costs could be brought down far lower, to an estimated
$400 - $1,000 per article. This cost, Odlyzko claims, would still
be too high to make pay-per-view a viable option, but it could
easily be covered by a subsidy model like Harnad's.
This model also dismisses the much-ballyhooed "copyright" issue as a
red herring as far as scholarly publishing is concerned. Since
scholars never expect to get paid directly for their work anyway,
the ability to protect profit by restricting copying is simply not
an issue (e-print.09). It only became an issue in scholarly
publishing because publishers-- not scholars --had to protect their
financial investment in the paper infrastructure.
Central to this argument is the distinction between mirroring of
paper journals and true electronic publishing (like _EJournal_)
which never sees print at all. Even all-electronic archives are
frequently no more than warehouses for scanned versions of paper
copy-- what Ginsparg deprecates as the "scan-and-shred" attitude to
publishing. Only all-electronic journals have the potential to free
themselves from the Faustian bargain with publishers.
3.2. Network Costs
One argument against the future of all-electronic journals is that
they are cheap only because the have been getting a free ride on the
Internet. As more services migrate to the net, and bandwidth
becomes even more strained than it is now, it may be necessary for
network providers to charge for carriage (Okerson, who-pays.16; see
also "Culture Shock"). These charges have the potential to wipe out
the cost savings of electronic scholarly journals.
Harnad points out that the Internet has also been giving a free ride
to "porno-graphics, flaming and trivial pursuit," all of which might
be looked to as ways of subsidizing the net before looking to
scholarly publication (e-print.08). But again, the most interesting
argument comes from a mathematician, Odlyzko.
[l. 318]
Since it is impossible to tell the difference between a packet of
text and a packet of graphics, video or audio data, Internet pricing
would have to be largely by-the-byte, perhaps with a surcharge for a
guarantee of no delays to permit applications such as
videoconferencing to proceed without interruption. By doing some
"back of an envelope" calculations, he surmises that the average
scholarly article in markup ASCII would cost something like 1/10,000
the cost of a one-hour videoconference (who-pays.19). Therefore the
costs of maintaining and upgrading the physical structure of the net
would be borne by high-end applications, not scholarly publishing
(see also MacKie-Mason and Varian).
3.3. Quality Control
Probably the biggest problem that electronic scholarly journals face
is quality control. Despite his optimistic claims for the future of
electronic publishing, Harnad suggests that the Internet in its
present state is little more than a "global graffiti board" in which
unregulated conversation seldom attains the status of scholarship
(who-pays.03). Other scholars such as Paul Ginsparg claim that this
may be true of large areas of the net such as Usenet, but that other
areas, such as his own electronic archive, have maintained high
scholarly standards. Harnad, however, points out that such
scholarly enclaves are in an extreme minority. Moreover, preprint
archives such as Ginsparg's are "parasitic on the refereed paper
literature for which most of its PREprints are ultimately destined"
(who-pays.03). In other words, the preprints are generally of good
quality because they are destined for a paper publication system
which already has in place a mature and well-organized peer-review
system.
This does not mean that a peer-review system cannot migrate to the
net; in many case it has done so already. Harnad simply points out
that electronic scholarship has a huge public relations job ahead of
it if it is going to convince the scholarly world that it can do the
job as well as paper publishing. A key component of this
public-relations job will be a coding system that not only tells the
reader whether an article is peer-reviewed, but also how rigorous
the peer-review is, thus locating it in a prestige hierarchy similar
to the one that has long reigned in print (who-pays.03).
An interesting sidebar to this argument is a proposal that the
current system of up-front evaluation of articles could be replaced
by a system that is in many ways more democratic. David Stodolsky
argues (who-pays.11) that we could abandon peer review altogether if
we let everyone publish anything and let citation rates be the true
measure of academic success. Citation-counting, an almost
impossible job in print, should be relatively easy to automate in
cyberspace. Harnad dismisses this idea: "I do not believe for a
minute, even in our absurdly populist age, that a popularity contest
and box scores can or will replace the systematic scrutiny
administered by editors and referees (imperfect as that is)."
(who-pays.13). Nonetheless, Stodolsky raises some interesting
possibilities occasioned by the powerful bibliometric apparatus
available on the net.
3.4. Stewardship [l. 375]
If scholarship does indeed "take to the skies," who should be in
charge of publishing and preserving it? Harnad's model takes its
inspiration from unregulated personal sites such as Ginsparg's
electronic archive, with the addition of peer review to the brew to
make public archives less "parasitic on the paper-based review
process." However, he leaves open the possibility that publishers
could move to electronic publication in order to avoid being left
behind, as long as they are prepared to go along with the "new
order" of open access to knowledge.
Others are not so sure. Stodolsky, for instance, argues that
commercial publishers are a lost cause because of their inherent
conflict of interest, and suggests that there is more potential in
commercial operators that benefit rather than lose by the move to
on-line access. One suggestion is smart-card operators who are in
the business of supplying secure access to data (e-print.12).
Regardless of who originates the data, the long-term question is who
will ensure that it remains accessible for the future. This, argues
Peter Graham, is the traditional job of the librarian, not the
scholar, the publisher, or the commercial vendor (e-print.12). Bill
Turner of Cornell Library neatly summarizes many of the most common
worries in this area: that archives may not be secure, that the data
may shift or be corrupted, that mistakes will be impossible to
correct (e-print.17). Harnad retorts that most of these problems,
especially the difficulty of correcting mistakes, are equally if not
more characteristic of paper publication (e-print.17). Secure,
encrypted, off-line archives will ensure the integrity of original
versions for those who are truly worried about this issue.
The arguments regarding both the technology and the philosophy of
long-term storage and accessibility are too complex to summarize
here, and are in a sense peripheral to the "subversive proposal"
itself. But archiving is an important piece of the puzzle.
Libraries promise to have a much more active role in the
dissemination of knowledge in the electronic universe than in the
paper universe, particularly if traditional publishers ultimately
drop out of the equation. (See Frank Quinn's article on this
subject in _EJournal_ V4N2.)
4. Analysis and Commentary
Harnad's optimistic vision of virtually free knowledge on the
Internet is certainly attractive. His differentiation between
"trade" and "esoteric" publishing, obvious once stated his way,
clarifies a distinction often blurred in discussions about
"products" on the Internet, and his acknowledgement that copyright
is simply irrelevant in esoteric publication removes a serious red
herring. Perhaps most important, he has the courage to point out
that, although publishers have performed an invaluable service to
scholars for generations, their service lies in dealing with the
intricacies of preparing and distributing paper. Much of this work
may simply be irrelevant to electronic scholarship.
[l. 430]
Quality control must surely be the most central issue here.
Considering the incredible pressure to publish, and the amount of
junk scholarship that finds its way even into existing paper
publications, and the incredible over-supply of publications that
defies the most heroic efforts of scholars to keep up with their
discipline, I am not terribly comfortable with Harnad's optimism
that quality control mechanisms will *automatically* migrate to the
net.
Harold Innis (1951) argues that media have a built-in bias toward
certain types of social activity. The bias of paper is a function
of its relative high cost, permanence and slowness (Innis calls it a
"light" medium only in comparison to stone and clay). The cost of
paper publication does not in itself ensure quality, but it
represents a built-in incentive to establish quality control
mechanisms. When a piece of research appears in print, the reader
has the assurance of knowing that someone has spent a considerable
amount of money to get it there and will therefore have taken some
steps to ensure that it is worth the cost. Not so in electronic
space.
In addition, paper publication provides tangible, object-centered
quality indicators. Expensively produced, polished-looking journals
naturally carry a prestige that cheaply produced journals do not,
for the above reasons. The fact that journals are distinct entities
in which individual articles are subsumed under a larger series,
itself an artefact of print publication, also allows certain
journals to acquire a reputation over time. Electronic publication,
especially the individually archived preprint, has none of these
quality-control signals. In other words, the "bias of the medium"
means that the physical characteristics of print publication carry
with them some important side benefits which may not migrate to
electronic space as easily as Harnad assumes.
Anyone whose sins have compelled her to function as an editor will
also know how poorly many scholars edit their own work. Material
that would be returned unmarked if submitted as an undergraduate
term paper somehow manages to get sent for publication. An editor
who is earnest about getting material in print, and is not in charge
of a journal of such high prestige that she can pick and choose
freely from a significant oversupply of good manuscripts, must
labour mightily to extract wheat from chaff. Because the boundary
between chat forums and scholarly journals has no physical markers
in cyberspace, the electronic editor must work even harder to
convince both readers and writers that she is not running a "global
graffiti board." This is not to say that such tasks are impossible,
but it is to say that the bias of the medium may make them more
difficult. If archived preprints do manage to "break down the
doors" of electronic scholarship and break away from the Faustian
bargain, the peer-reviewed electronic journals that follow will have
to labour mightily to establish and keep their reputations without
the hardcopy signals of quality that we have grown so attached to.
[l. 483]
Unfortunately, we can already see signs that the economics of print
are migrating to the net in ways that blow very cold on the back the
neck. One electronic journal, the _Electronic Journal of
Communication_, began as a totally free journal supported by
whatever academic brownie points its editors and contributors
accumulated for their labours. However, the Comserve system that
archives and distributes _EJC_ is now part of CIOS, the
Communication Institute for Online Scholarship. In order to raise
money for its activities, CIOS charges for membership, and denies
full database retrieval privileges to non-members. These charges
are undoubtedly justified; there is only so much that a free service
can accomplish on goodwill and public purse. But the effect is that
_EJC_ is now confined behind exactly the same sort of firewall that
Harnad denounces as antithetical to esoteric scholarship. Its
authors are in some ways less accessible than if they published only
in print journals that their colleagues could read in libraries free
of charge.
Another disturbing trend is the invention of "ecash," a secure
electronic medium of exchange that obviates the need to transmit
charge card information over the net (see the Ecash Home Page at
http://www.digicash.com/ecash ).
Such a mechanism makes perfect sense in the context of classic trade
models such as mail-order commodities, commercial journals, and
commercial films, music and the like. The problem is that in its
present form, ecash doesn't represent "real" money at all. It is
intended for use as part of a totally on-line economy. You use
ecash to buy access to on-line information that has been placed in
electronic "shopping malls." If you run out of ecash, the only way
to get more is to post some information that you hope others will
find useful enough to buy.
The system has not had, and probably will not have, any influence on
electronic scholarship. In fact, commercial transactions on the Net
are undoubtedly necessary in order to pay for the infrastructure and
ensure that scholarship can still get a free, or cheap, ride. But
it is nonetheless disturbing to see the development of a powerful
incentive to sell what has traditionally been posted free. Since
information is the main "product" of the Net, there is an incentive
for this market economy to migrate from a trade in sex toys to
a trade in knowledge. I don't disparage everything about capitalism,
but I have to admit that it has been refreshing to work in a medium
which has until recently been free of market forces by virtue of its
technological structure.
Where is all of this heading? Of course we really have no idea, any
more than Gutenberg did when he began his work. What is clear is
that economics and technology have a very uneasy relationship. We
have depended on an economically driven reward system for the
distribution of our ideas ever since the printing press made the
tribally subsidized bard obsolete. It is not at all clear whether
the Internet, rapidly turning into the "Information Highway"
complete with toll booths and fast-food restaurants, will be able to
reverse this dependency. Harnad's image of the "Faustian bargain"
for the soul of academic knowledge is more apt than I like to think.
[l. 541]
Probably the most important lesson of Harnad's work is that
cyberspace is a medium inherently different from print, and that
current "papyrocentric" models (one of Harnad's most felicitous
terms) are likely to be very short on vision. One is reminded of
the incunabula period of the book trade, during which books were
printed to look as much like manuscripts as possible, and the Abbot
of Sponheim urged monks to keep copying manuscripts by hand both to
encourage diligence and devotion and to circumvent the
"impermanence" of printed publication on paper (Eisenstein 1979:
14). We must remember that esoteric publication has had its crises
of distribution and quality control before, and that some of the
solutions to these crises-- including the Faustian bargain with the
for-profit publication industry --were totally unimaginable by those
at the centre of the shift. Media, knowledge and money have
performed an intricate dance for many hundreds of years, and we can
be certain that, whatever form the dance takes next, all three
partners will be involved.
[ Thanks to Stevan Harnad, Paul Ginsparg and Andy Odlyzko for their
correspondence and clarifications. ]
Note:
The bulk of Harnad's work is archived at
ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad
and at
http://www.princeton.edu/~Harnad.
This includes major articles, including those cited below, and most
of the archived discussion on the "subversive proposal." The latter
is contained in two sets of files whose filenames begin either
"e-print" or "who-pays." These may be found at
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal
See also the later exchange between Harnad and Steve Fuller,
referenced below as Harnad, S. (1995b).
[ Another place to start looking for most of the texts related to
this issue is in the regularly refreshed Hyperjournal Web area of
Goldsmiths' College server:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/ Ed.]
--------- ---------- ---------- ----------
REFERENCES: [l. 588]
"Culture Shock on the Networks," _Science_ August 12, 1994: 879 -
81.
Eisenstein, E. (1979) _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change._
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication
Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. _Psychological Science_ 1: 342 -
343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting/
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in
the Means of Production of Knowledge. _Public-Access Computer
Systems Review_ 2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in _PACS Annual
Review_ Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) _Computer
Conferencing: The Last Word_. Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in:
M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: _Directory of Electronic Journals,
Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists_ [A. Okerson, ed], 2nd
edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office
of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992).
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg/
Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the American
Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
Publishing. _Serials Review_, Special Issue on Economics Models for
Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub/
Harnad, S. (1995a) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific
Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. &
Newby, G. (Eds.) _Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The
Agenda for the Year 2000_. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.peer.review/
Harnad, S. (1995b) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis.
_Serials Review_ 21(1), pp. 70-72 1995.
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis/
Abridged version in _Times Higher Education Supplement_ 12 May 1995.
Innis, H. (1951) _The Bias of Communication_. Toronto: Toronto
University Press.
MacKie-Mason, J.K. and H. R. Varian, Some economics of the Internet,
in _Networks, Infrastructure and the New Task for Regulation_, W.
Sichel, ed., to appear. (Available via gopher or ftp together with
other related papers from
gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu in /pub/Papers.)
Odlyzko, A, (1994) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending
demise of traditional scholarly journals. _Intern. J. Human-Computer
Studies_ (formerly _Intern. J. Man-Machine Studies_) 41 (1995), in
press. Available via e-mail [the ftp file is compressed. Ed.]
msg: send tragic.loss from att/math/odlyzko
to : netlib@research.att.com
or from
ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z (WWW)
netlib.att.com netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z (anonymous FTP)
Okerson, A. and J. O'Donnell. (1995) _Scholarly Journals at the
Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing_.
Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries.
Quinn, F. (1994) A role for libraries in electronic publication.
_EJournal_ V4N2, ll. 68 - 416.
Stix, G. (1994) The speed of write. _Scientific American_,
271(6),December. 106 - 111.
by Doug Brent dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca
University of Calgary
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[ This essay in Volume 5 Number 1 of _EJournal_ (June, 1995) is (c)
copyright 1995 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give
it away. _EJournal_ assigns any and all financial interest to Doug
Brent. This note must accompany all copies of this text. ]
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EDITORIAL COMMENT [l. 687]
E-PUBLISHING AND QUALITY CONTROL
It looks as if two facile assumptions-- that e-publishing is
(merely) expedient and that (only) paper publishing is permanent--
will fade gradually during the transition to paperless publishing of
"esoteric" texts. That's fine. All in good time. Meanwhile and
beyond, though, worries about maintaining standards will continue.
One big worry is that unreviewed self-publication is so easy on the
net that we'll be overwhelmed with junk. Not to worry; academics
will will seek and find someone to filter the junk for them.
Junk-detectors can establish reputations as easily in e-space as in
the paper-bound world.
A second worry, less often heard, is that the ease and speed of peer
review in e-space might stifle discovery. Originality could be
suffocated by the volume of complaints from establishmentarians;
accommodating all objections could lead to bland committee reports
instead of unequivocal declarations. Again, that worry fades when
seen as a procedural, not a medium-related, concern.
A third quality-control concern is usually associated with
narrowness of specialization. Some cynics think that a cadre of
sub-sub-specialists within a discipline can easily promote each
others' careers by just starting a journal, publishing their
buddies' work, and arguing that no one else is qualified to find
fault with what *they* agree is good work. Unless one knows how
much money and effort it takes to start a journal, the whole
process-- including peer review -- can look like a mutual-promotion
collaboration.
Here's where the medium makes a big difference. Finding specialists
to collaborate with is easier through e-mail than on paper. And
"starting a journal" on the net, although not effortless, is
inxpensive. Most telling: In circumstances where some colleagues
feel left out of the loop-- they don't read texts on a screen --the
intellectual integrity of an electronic journal is questionable by
default. (A printout doesn't look "published.")
In such a context, this current issue of _EJournal_ looks especially
suspicious. It consists of an assessment of Stevan Harnad's
"Subversive Proposal" and the follow-up exchanges. Stevan is a
member of our Advisory Board. The author, Doug Brent, is one of our
Consulting Editors, and a frequent contributor. Ann Okerson,
another member of the Board, has co-edited a collection of the same
texts. Have we conspired to promote each other, or a point of
view? No. But the problem, the perception problem, the medium-related
problem, is real. Electronic journals cannot dismiss this vector of
skepticism about their legitimacy with an easy retort about how "the
issues are the same in any medium."
About _EJournal_ V5N1: I asked Doug Brent to summarize and review
the "Subversive Proposal" archive last winter. The editorial
process was anonymous; the reviewers did not know who had written
the essay, nor that I had asked for it. After reading it, they did
have some reservations, but recommended publication without dissent.
I didn't know at that point that Ann Okerson was working on a
paper-based collection of the discussion.
Believers in electronic delivery of academic texts cannot shrug off
the understandable reservations some colleagues will have about
quality. Louder and louder explanations of how wonderful we are
won't help; the default skepticism will disappear only with
generational succession. Meanwhile, sound procedures and
self-conscious attention to integrity are crucial to earning our
colleagues' respect. And doing some good things that paper-based
journals don't do-- as Stevan Harnad and Paul Ginsparg are doing
-- won't hurt at all.
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NOTICE: Cybernetics in Vienna, April 1996 [l. 758]
A Symposium called "Theories and Metaphors of Cyberspace" is
being organized by the Principia Cybernetica Project at the
Cybernetics and Systems Research Meeting.
The Symposium URL is:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/cybspasy.html
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NOTE: [l. 769]
Readers interested in the development of children's writing- seeing-
hearing- reading abilities may remember David Coniam's essay
"Literacy for the Next Generation: Writing Without Handwriting" in
_EJournal_ V2N2 (June, 1992). Software that looks adaptable for
what he advocates-- letting young people enjoy hearing sounds made
when keys and key-combinations are struck --is reviewed in
_Computers and the Humanities_ V28N6 (1994-95), 409-412:
"TalkingKeyPro: Digital Speech for the Macintosh," by Helen E. Karn.
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About _EJournal_:
_EJournal_ is an all-electronic, e-mail delivered, peer-reviewed,
academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and
practice surrounding the creation, transmission, storage,
interpretation, alteration and replication of electronic "text" -
including "display" - broadly defined. We are also interested in
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Recipients may make paper copies; _EJournal_ will provide
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Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s
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-
Board of Advisors:
Stevan Harnad University of Southampton
Dick Lanham University of California at Los Angeles
Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries
Joe Raben City University of New York
Bob Scholes Brown University
Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal
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-
Consulting Editors - June, 1995
ahrens@alpha.hanover.edu John Ahrens Hanover
srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary
djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany
donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
erdtt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue-Calumet
gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Penn State
kahnas@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison
nakaplan@ubmail.ubalt.edu Nancy Kaplan Baltimore
nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond
ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond
twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan
wcooper@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta
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Editor: Ted Jennings, emeritus, University at Albany
Assistant Editor: Chris Funkhouser, University at Albany
Technical Associate: Jennifer Wyman, University at Albany
Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, University at Albany
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Department of English
and
Computing and Network Services
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University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222 USA