Nature & Science on Ejournals & Elibs

[Lloyd Davidson]

Harnad, Stevan "On-line Journals and Financial Fire Walls."   Nature 395
(10 Sept. 98), 127-128. (This essay forwards Nature's annual New Journals
review supplement)

Harnad's article begins with what I consider to be a somewhat overly
optimistic vision of a future where "sooner or later, the entire corpus [of
learned journal literature] will be fully and freely accessible and
navigable from the desk of any thinker in the world."  If such a world
should ever materialize, it will probably be much  "later" than "sooner."
His argument seems to be that Ginsparg's physics archive
(http://xxx.lanl.gov), along with similar archives for other disciplines
(e.g. computer science and cognitive science at
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk), will soon make other forms of publishing
obsolete as such services "go on to subsume (or subserve, rather) all the
rest of the learned serial literature...."  It is true that such archives
are having a significant effect in the field of  physics, although he
doesn't mention that Ginsparg's archive is supported by a good sized NSF
grant and, though free to the end user, is hardly free of cost, even if a
good bargain relative to its amount of use (certainly better than many
journals).   He also discusses the cost of electronic V. paper publishing,
which he says differs by either 70% or 30%.  He firmly states that new
electronic-only journals cost 70% less to publish than those on paper and
that the relatively small 30% cost difference found in paper journals that
shift to electronic production is primarily due to the inability or
unwillingness of their publishers to restructure their operations so they
take better advantage of online techniques.  Changes such as having authors
take over responsibility for doing their own editing and markup would, he
feels, decrease their first-page costs considerably. These figures and
analysis badly need verification and may not apply at all to major journals
of high prestige such as Journal of Biological Chemistry, Nature, and
Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Harnad's solution to today's journal price rise dilemma is very straight
forward indeed, although possibly just a bit naive: 
    "There is a way, and it would allow individual scholars to have 
    their cake and eat it too.  The proposal is simple, and subversive.  
    All authors should continue to entrust their work to the paper 
    journals of their choice.  But if, in addition, they were to 
    publicly archive their pre-refereeing preprints and then their post-
    refereeing reprints on-line on their home servers, for free for all, 
    then the de facto practices of the reader community would take care 
    of the rest...; library serial cancellations, the collapse of the 
    paper cardhouse, publisher perestroika, and a free for all, e-only 
    serial corpus financed by author-end page charges would soon follow 
    suit."
Copyright laws, tenure decisions, accessibility problems and practical
economic concerns, including the profit motive of publishers and other
commercial concerns, such as meeting the needs of advertisers and
professional writers and editors, will no doubt impede the implementation
of this plan at least a little bit.  Still, it probably will take an
energetic idealist and visionary like Steve Harnad to begin to move things
along and perhaps eventually overcome such barriers, if, indeed, they can
be overcome.  
------------------------------------------
Alper, Joseph "Assembling the World's Biggest Library on Your Desktop."
Science 281 (5384) (18 Sept. 98), 1784-1786.

This article describes the work being done on the "universal library" at
Carnegie Mellon by Raj Reddy and Michael Shamos and various components that
will make up such a system.  Highlighted are the Medline concept space
indexing project being tackled by Bruce Schatz and Hsinchun Chen at Urbana,
IL and Tucson, AZ, and the Cha-Cha project of Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley
(http://cha-cha.berkeley.edu), which is a search interface for use on
large, heterogeneous web sites.  Other innovative projects are also
outlined, all of which are designed to begin to tame the massive amounts of
data that libraries and others are making available on the Internet.  While
some of these projects may not have payoffs for 20 to 50 years (if ever),
they are examples of the new ideas that are going into the design of online
databases and search engines.  Through their application we may begin to
more easily extract meaningful information from text, images (still, 3D and
moving) maps, sounds, music and even raw databases and make it usefully
accessible to researchers and others who search for material on the Web.

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Lloyd A. Davidson
Life Sciences Librarian and Head, Access Services 
Seeley G. Mudd Library for Science and Engineering
2233 N. Campus Drive
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL  60208

Ldavids at nwu.edu  (847)491-2906 (Voice)    (847)491-4655 (fax)