======================================================================== 686
The following may be pertinent to the net publishing debate: D. Forsdyke
_________________________________________________________________________
Subject: Odlyzko's report on electronic publishing (fwd)
Comments are solicited.
Andrew Odlyzko
amo at research.att.com
Tragic loss or good riddance?
The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals
Condensed version
July 16, 1994
Andrew M. Odlyzko
AT\&T Bell Laboratories
amo at research.att.com
I. Introduction
Traditional printed journals are a comfortable and familiar
aspect of scholarly work. They have been the primary means of
communicating research results, and as such have performed an
invaluable service. However, they are an awkward artifact,
although a highly developed one, of the print technology that was
the only one available over the last few centuries for
large-scale communication. The growth of the scholarly
literature, together with the rapidly increasing power and
availability of electronic technology, are creating tremendous
pressures for change. The purpose of this article is to give a
broad picture of these pressures and to argue that the coming
changes may be abrupt.
It is often thought that changes will be incremental, with
perhaps a few electronic journals appearing and further use of
email, ftp, etc. My guess is that change will be far more drastic.
Traditional scholarly journals will likely disappear within 10 to
20 years. and the electronic alteratives will be different from
current periodicals, even though they may carry the same titles.
There are obvious dangers in discontinuous change away from a
system that has served the scholarly community well [Quinn].
However, I am convinced that future systems of communication will
be much better than the traditional journals. Although the
transition may be painful, there is the promise of a substantial
increase in the effectiveness of scholarly work. This promise is
especially likely to be realized if we are aware of the issues,
and plan the evolution away from the present system as early as
possible. In any event, we do not have much choice since drastic
change is inevitable no matter what our preferences are.
Predictions and comments in this article apply to most scholarly
disciplines. However, I will write primarily about mathematics,
since I am most familiar with that field and the data that I have
is clearest for it. Different areas have different needs and
cultures and are likely to follow somewhat different paths in the
evolution of their communications.
II. Growth of literature
The impending changes in scholarly publications are caused by
the confluence of two trends. One is the growth in the size of the
scholarly literature, the other the growth of electronic
technology.
The number of scientific papers published annually has been
doubling every 10-15 years for the last two centuries [Price].
This is also true of mathematics alone. In 1870 there were only
about 840 papers published in mathematics. Today, about 50,000
papers are published annually. The growth was not even, and a
more careful look at the statistics shows that from the end of
World War 2 until 1990, the number of papers published has been
doubling about every 10 years [MR]. Growth has stopped recently,
but this is likely to be one of the temporary pauses that have
occurred before.
The exponential growth in mathematical publishing has
interesting implications. Adding up the numbers in [MR] or simply
extrapolating from the current figure of about 50,000 papers per
year and a doubling every 10 years, we come to the conclusion
that about 1,000,000 mathematical papers have ever been
published. What is much more surprising to most people (but is a
simple arithmetic consequence of the growth rate) is that almost
half of them have been published in the last 10 years. Even if we
manage to limit the rate of publication to 50,000 papers per year,
we will double the size of the mathematical literature in another
20 years.
Scholarly publishing has some features that sharply differentiate
it from the popular fiction or biography markets, and make rapid
growth difficult to cope with. Research papers are written by
specialists for specialists. Furthermore, scholars do not receive
any direct financial remuneration for their papers, and give them
to publishers only in order to disseminate the information to
other scholars.
Scholarly publishing would be facing a minor inconvenience and
not a crisis if the scale of this enterprise were small enough. If
a university department were paying \$ 5,000 per year for journals,
it could deal with several decades of doubling in size and cost of
the subscriptions before anything drastic had to be done.
However, good mathematics libraries spend well over \$ 100,000 per
year just for journal subscriptions, and the cost of staff and
space is usually at least twice that. Budgets that large are
bound to be scrutinized for possible reductions.
III. Technological advances
A doubling of scholarly papers published each decade
corresponds to an exponential growth rate of about 7 \% per year.
This is fast, but nowhere near as fast as the rate of growth in
information processing and transmission. Microprocessors are
currently doubling in speed every 18 months, corresponding to a
growth rate of 60 \% per year. Similarly dramatic growth figures
are valid for information storage and transmission. For example,
the costs of the NSF-supported backbone of the Internet
increased by 68\% during the period 1988-91, but the traffic went
up by a factor of 128 [MacKieV]. The point of citing these figures
and those below is that advances in technology have made it
possible to transform scholarly publishing in ways that were
impossible even a couple of years ago.
Recall that about 50,000 mathematical papers are published each
year. If they were all typeset in TeX, then at a rough average of
50,000 bytes per paper, they would require 2.5 GB of storage.
We can now buy a 9 GB magnetic disk for about \$ 3,000. For
archival storage of papers, though, we can use other
technologies, such as optical disks. A disk with a 7 GB capacity
that can be written once costs \$ 200-300. Digital tapes with 250
GB capacities are expected to become available soon. Thus
electronic storage capacity needed for dissemination of research
results in mathematics is trivial with today's technology.
We conclude that is it already possible to store all the current
mathematical publications at an annual cost much less than that
of the subscription to a single journal. What about the papers
published over the preceding centuries? Since there are 1,000,000
of them, it would require about 50 GB to store them if they were
all in TeX. Conversion of old papers to TeX seems unlikely.
However, storage of bitmaps of these papers, compressed with
current fax standards, requires less than 1,000 GB. This is large,
but it is still less than 150 of the current large optical disks.
For comparison, Wal-Mart has a database of over 1,000 GB that is
stored on magnetic disks, and is processed intensively all the
time.
Within a decade we may have systems for personal computers that
can store 1,000 GB. Even before that, university departments will
be able to afford storage systems able to store all the
mathematical literature. This ability will mean a dramatic change
in the way we operate. For example, if you can call up any paper
on your screen, and after deciding that it looks interesting, print
it out on the laser printer on your desktop, will you need a
library?
Communication networks are improving rapidly. Most departments
have their machines on Ethernet networks, which operate at
almost 10 Mbs (millions of bits per second). Further, almost all
universities now have access to the Internet, which was not the
case even a couple of years ago. The Internet backbone operates
at 45 Mbs, and prototypes of much faster systems are already in
operations. Movies-on-demand will mean wide availability of
networks with speed in the hundreds of megabits per second. If
your local supplier can get you the movie of your choice at the
time of your choice for under \$ 10 (as it will have to, in order
for the system to be economic), then sending over the 50 MB of
research papers in your specialty for the last year will cost
pennies. Scientists might not like to depend on systems that owe
their existence to the demand for X-rated movies, but they will
use them when they become available.
Not only have information storage and transmission capacities
grown, but the software has become much easier to use.
Computerized typesetting systems have become so common that it
is rare to encounter a manuscript typed on an ordinary
typewriter. Moreover, scholars are increasingly doing their own
typesetting. This trend is partially due to cutbacks in
secretarial support, but is caused primarily by scholars
preferring the greater control and faster execution that they can
obtain by doing their own typesetting. With modern technology,
doing something is becoming easier than explaining to another
person what to do.
Two centuries ago there was a huge gap between what a scholar
could do and what the publishers provided. A printed paper was
far superior in legibility to hand-written copies of the preprint,
and it was cheaper to produce than hiring scribes to make
hundreds of copies. Today the cost advantage of publishers is
gone, as it is far cheaper to send out electronic versions of a
paper than to have it printed in a journal. The quality advantage
of journals still exists, but it is rapidly eroding.
IV. Preprints and electronic journals
Advances in technology allow for much more convenient
dissemination of information. Preprints have already become the
main method in mathematics and many other fields for experts to
communicate their latest results among each other. Electronics is
making this process much easier. Two approaches are becoming
common. One is for departments to set up publicly accessible
directories from which anyone can copy the latest preprints via
anonymous ftp. The other is to use preprint servers, with
scholars sending their preprints to a central database. Wide use
of these methods is a great boon to scholars, but it is extremely
subversive of journal publications. If I can get a preprint of a
published paper for free, why should I (or my library) pay for the
journal?
The subversive effect of wide preprint distribution is bound to
force changes on the traditional scholarly journals. Moreover, the
changes could be sudden. For example, the preprint server that
Paul Ginsparg set up for high energy theoretical physics became
the standard information dissemination method in that area within
one year. It has since been adopted by other fields as well. Such
sudden changes are common in high technology areas (as in the
dramatic rise in popularity of fax machines, or the catastropic
decline of the mainframe) and could occur in journal publishing.
During a future financial squeeze at a university, a dean might
come to a mathematics department and offer a deal: "Either you
give up paper journal subscriptions, or you give up one position."
Today such as offer would not be considered seriously, since
journals are still indispensable. However, in 10 years or so, once
preprints are freely available, giving up the journals is likely to
be the preferred response.
Preprints have a deservedly different status than refereed
journal publications. However, the new technologies are making
possible easy publication of electronic journals by scholars
alone. It is just as easy for editors to place manuscripts of
refereed papers in a publicly accessible directory or a preprint
server as it is to do so for their own preprints. The number of
electronic journals is small, but it is rising rapidly.
I expect that scholarly publishing will move to almost
exclusively electronic means of information dissemination. This
will be caused by the economic push of having to cope with
increasing costs of the present system and the attractive pull of
the new features that electronic publishing offers.
V. The interactive potential of electronic publications
Because conventional print journals have been an integral part
of scholarly life for so long, their inflexibility is often not
appreciated. Most mathematical journals are available at about
1,000 research libraries around the world. Even for the scholars
at those institutions, access to journals requires a physical trip,
often to another building, and is restricted to certain hours.
Electronic journals will make access available around the clock
from the convenience of the scholar's study. It will also make
literature searches much easier. For journals without
subscription fees, access will be available from anywhere in the
world.
Frank Quinn [Quinn] argues that the reliability of mathematical
literature justifies extreme caution in moving away from paper
journals, lest we be tempted into "blackboard-style" publishing
practices that are common in some fields. He advocates keeping a
strong distinction between informal preprint distribution and the
formal refereed publications, even in an electronic format. I
agree that mathematicians should strive to preserve and enhance
the reliability of mathematical literature. However, I feel that
Quinn's concerns are largely misplaced, and might serve to keep
mathematicians and other scholars from developing better methods
for communicating their results. I feel a better solution is to
have an integrated system that combines the informal
netnews-type postings with preprints and electronic journal
publication. Stevan Harnad has been advocating just such a
solution [Harnad1], and has coined the terms scholarly skywriting
and prepublication continuum to denote the process in which
scholars merge their informal communications with formal
publications. Where I differ from Harnad is in the form of peer
review that is likely to take place. Whereas Harnad advocates a
conventional form, I feel that a reviewing continuum that matches
the publication continuum is more appropriate.
I will describe the system I envisage as if it were operating on
a single centralized database machine. However, this is for
convenience only, and any working system would almost certainly
involve duplicated or different but coordinated systems. I will
not deal with the software aspects of this system, which will
surely involve hypertext links, so that a click on a reference or
comment would instantly bring up a window with that paper or
comment in it.
At the bottom level of future systems, anyone could submit a
preprint to the system. There would have to be some control on
submissions, but it could probably be minor. Standards similar to
those at the Abstracts of the AMS might be appropriate, so that
proofs that the Earth is flat, or that special relativity is a
Zionist conspiracy, would be kept out. Discussions of whether
Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays might be accepted (since there
are interesting statistical approaches to this question). There
would also be digital signatures and digital timestamping, to
provide authentication. The precise rules for how the system
would function would have to be decided by experimentation. For
example, one feature of the system might be that nothing that is
ever submitted could be withdrawn. This would help enforce
quality, since posters submitting poorly prepared papers risk
having their errors exposed and documented.
Once a preprint was accepted, it would be available to anyone.
Depending on subject classification or keywords, notification of
its arrival would be sent to those subscribing to alerting
services in the appropriate areas. Comments would be solicited
from anyone (subject again to some minor limitations), and would
be appended to the original paper. There could be provisions for
anonymous comments as well as signed ones. The author would
have the opportunity to submit revised versions of the paper in
response to the comments (or own further work). All the versions
of the papers, as well as all the comments, would remain part of
the record. This process could continue indefinitely, even a
hundred years after the initial submission. Author X, writing a
paper that improves an earlier result Y(123) of author Y, would be
encouraged to submit a comment to Y(123) to that effect. Even
authors who just reference Y(123) would be encouraged to note
that in comments on Y(123). (Software would do much of this
automatically.) This way a research paper would be a living
document, evolving as new comments and revisions were added.
This process by itself would go a long way towards providing
trustworthy results. Most important, it would provide immediate
feedback to scholars. While the unsolicited comments would
require evaluation to be truly useful, and in general would not
compare in trustworthiness with formal referee reports, they
would be better than no information at all. Scholars would be free
to choose their own filters for this corpus of preprints and
commentary. For example, some could decide not to trust any
unrefereed preprint that had not attracted positive comments
from at least three scholars from the Ivy League schools.
Grafted on top of this almost totally uncoordinated and
uncontrolled system there would be an editorial and refereeing
structure. This would be absolutely necessary to deal with many
submissions. While unsolicited comments are likely to be helpful
in deciding on the novelty and correctness of many papers, they
are unlikely to be sufficient in most cases. There is need to
assure that all the literature that scholars might rely on is
subject to a uniform standard of refereeing (at least as far as
correctness is concerned), and at the same time control the load
on reviewers by minimizing duplicate work. Both tasks are hard to
achieve with an uncoordinated randomized system of commentary. A
formal review process will be indispensable. There would have to
be editors who would then arrange for proper peer review. The
editors could be appointed by learned societies, or even be
self-appointed. (The self-correcting nature of science would
take care of the poor ones, I expect. We do have vanity presses
even now, and they have not done appreciable damage.) These
editors could then use the comments that have accumulated to
help them assess the correctness and importance of the results
in a submissions and to select official referees. (After all, who is
better qualified to referee a paper than somebody who had enough
interest to look at it and comment knowledgeably on it? It is
usually easy to judge someone's knowledge of a subject and
thoroughness of reading a manuscript from their comments.) The
referee reports and evaluations could be added as comments to
the paper, but would be marked as such. That way someone looking
for information in homological algebra, say, and who is not
familiar with the subject, could set his or her programs to search
the database only for papers that have been reviewed by an
acknowledged expert or a trusted editorial board. Just as today,
there would be survey and expository papers, which could be
treated just like all the other ones. As new information
accumulated with time, additional reviews of old papers might be
solicited as needed, to settle disputes.
The proposal above is designed to work within the confines of
what we can expect both technology and ordinary fallible people
to accomplish. It would integrate the roles of authors, casual
readers, and official referees. The proposed system would allow
peers to contribute to scholars' work much better. The main
advantage of this proposal is that it would provide a continuum
of peer review that more closely matches the publication
continuum that is likely to evolve.
VI. The future of publishers, journals, and libraries
It is impossible to predict the date or speed of transition to
systems like the one outlined in the previous section, but only
because they will be determined primarily by sociological factors.
The technology that is necessary for future systems is either
already available or will be in a few years. The speed with which
this technology will be adopted by scholars will depend on how
quickly we are prepared to break with traditional methods in
favor of a superior but novel system. For example, how quickly
will tenure and promotion committees start accepting electronic
publications as comparable to those in traditional journals?
What would be the role of publishers in the projected system?
Scholars can run electronic journals themselves, with no financial
subsidies or subscription fees, using only the spare capacity of
the computers and networks that are provided to them as part of
their job. This is the model under which most of the current
electronic journals in mathematics operate. There is more work
for authors and editors in such a system than with traditional
print journals, but advances in technology are decreasing the
effort that is required. A major advantage of such a system is
that the journal can be available for free anytime everyplace that
data networks reach. However, the lack of copy editing that is
likely to prevail in such a system may not be acceptable. I
expect that what editing assistance might be required will not
cost anywhere near what print journals cost, and so might be
provided by the authors' institutions. If that happens, electronic
journals can also be distributed freely. If such assistance is not
provided, then subscription fees will have to be imposed, together
with access restrictions to the information. However, to compete
successfully with free preprint distribution and free journals,
any subscription journals will have to keep their fees low. In any
event, I expect that publishers will have to shrink.
Paper journals will have to convert to electronic publication or
disappear. The role of paper is likely to be limited to temporary
uses, and archival storage will be electronic.
Review papers are likely to play an increasingly important role,
but they are written by scholars and can be published in regular
electronic journals. On the other hand, short bibliographic
reviews, such as are common in Math. Rev. and Zentralblatt, might
be replaced by computerized searches, since the entire literature
will be available on each scholar's workstation. This might mean
the demise of Math. Rev. and Zentralblatt. However, I suspect that
they will do well, although they will have to change. They are
inexpensive enough that they do not need to offer much extra
service to justify their price. There will always be need for
classifying papers, ensuring that all significant ones are
reviewed, and keeping track of all the changes in the databases.
Review journal will have to change. They will need to be
accessible electronically, and will most likely be paid for by a
site license fee, giving unlimited access to the database to all
scholars affiliated with the customer institution. They will
provide much more current information than is true today, since
there will be no publications delays. The formats of reviews might
vary from those used today. The main distinction from today is
likely to be the presence of hypertext links from reviews to the
papers and the commentaries associated to those papers.
Combined with easy electronic access to the primary materials,
review journals will then provide all the functions of a
specialized library.
What about libraries? They will also have to shrink and change
their role. The transition to the new system is likely to be less
painful for them than for publishers. There is much more inertia
in the library system, with old collections of printed material
that will need to be preserved and converted to digital formats.
Eventually, though, we are even likely to need very few reference
librarians. If the review journals evolve the way I project, they
will provide directly to scholars all the services that libraries
used to. With immediate electronic access to all the information
in a field, with navigating tools, reviews, and other aids, a few
dozen librarians and scholars at review journals might be able to
substitute for a thousand reference librarians.
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\bye
