Re: copyright under stress

As the changing nature of academic publishing is much of the mission focus of the Coalition for Networked Information, I feel compelled to respond to your statements, John. One of the great success stories of the Coalition is undoubtedly the fact that so many people participate in the CNI-COPYRIGHT without fully understanding why the Coalition was established and why we initiated this dicussion list to begin with.

On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
>
> I undoubtedly do not understand all the ins and outs of peer reviewed
> journals.
>
> I assume that people write scholarly articles for journals not for
> profit, but rather for intangibles such as prestige, the desire to
> share, advancing the profession, self pride, etc.
>
> Surely similar intangibles could be applied to reward the reviewers?

Actually, profit does enter into the equation prominently, although it is too often masked by the "intangible" rewards you mention above. This has its merits and its problems.

In research universities, traditionally, tenure is tied to publication. Publication in peer-reviewed journals carries considerably more weight than other forms of publication (review being one of those). Campus politics aside, at the most prestigious universitites gaining tenure without a significant track-record of peer-reviewed publication is virtually impossible. Although most university tenure policies include other methods of earning credit toward tenure (teaching, service to community, non-print publications such as database compilation, etc.), publication in peer-reviewed literature is usually the lion's share (70-80%) of the deciding factor in whether to tenure an employee.

Beyond tenure, there is an issue of competition for research funding. A track record of peer-reviewed publication is often a significant factor in determining who will receive funding for research from the Federal Government, non-profit foundations, and increasingly from private corporations.

The phrase in academe is "publish or perish." If you can disregard concerns for one's continued employment, then I guess people really do write all those scholarly articles for the intangible reasons you mention. But realistically...

> Once one abandoned print (I hear the gasps) the costs of production
> would, I think, be very small.

Common sense would lead one to think so, but the jury is still out on this. It is a topic which the Coalition (and Paul Peters) spent a considerable amount of effort exploring in the early years of our existence.

There are economies of scale in journal production, but those tend to exist in the least expensive part of the publication process. I forget the exact figures, but in the early days of CD production in the recording industry I saw it reported that it would cost a company something like a few thousand dollars to produce the first CD, and $.02 for each one thereafter. Journal production is not unlike CD production in the music industry. Once the journal layout is complete, printing 1 copy or printing 10,000 copies costs about the same. The only thing that really changes is the unit cost.

The chief thing that makes an academic journal different than _Time_ magazine is the rigorous editorial process the articles undergo. With a few rare exceptions that have specialized printing needs (_The Journal of Mass Spectrometry_) the actual costs associated with publication of an academic journal are not to be found in the printing process. Nor is there all that much cost in copy editing. Most academic journals have required authors to submit their works to the editor electronically for 10-15 years and all the suspect tools (spell checkers, grammer checkers, page layout tools, etc.) are used. The significant costs are related to staffing, the editorial process, and peer review. The more specialized the discipline, the greater the need for reviewers with specialized knowledge. These kinds of costs don't change all that much just because the articles are being disseminated electronically.

Finally, there are issues of preservation and maintenance in electronic publication models. In the print environment, the publsher's responsibility for those aspects of the journal ended at the point the trucks leave the warehouse with the printed copies. University libraries purchased the journal, and it was the libraries' responsibility to deal with issues of continued access and preservation. One of the attractions of electronic publication is that the publishers can retain control over distribution for a longer duration. There is a tendancy to license "access" to their databases of articles, rather than to sell subscriptions to tangible copies. In this brave new world, the publisher has to operate networks, servers, and services. That means more people -- people to adminster those services. Those are all *new* costs invoked by electronic publication.

In recent years, many universities (ostensibly, seeing the writing on the wall) have begun to credit for electronic publication in their tenure policies. Projects such as SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which also operates along with the Coalition at the offices of the Association of Research Libraries, see <http://www.arl.org/sparc/>) and JSTOR (see <http://www.jstor.org/>) are exploring new methodologies for scholarly publishing in a networked world.

Nevertheless (and though, admittedly, a lot has changed in the last 10 years since I actually worked at a university), I think there is little doubt that most tenure review committees would still place more emphasis on a few significant articles in the most prestigious print journals within a particular discipline rather than a list of URLs linked from a faculty member's homepage pointing to the same articles published on the Web electronically.

-- 

                         Craig A. Summerhill
    Coalition Manager o'Lists -- The Postmaster -- listmgr[_at_]cni.org
    Coalition for Networked Information; 21 Dupont Circle, N.W., 
    Suite 800; Washington, D.C.   20036   listmgr[_at_]cni.org (Postmaster)