30 NOVEMBER 1999
DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, THE NETHERLANDS
Publishing Models
By RIK HOEKSTRA
On November 30, the library of Delft University of Technology hosted a Workshop on Publishing Models. The problem discussed at the workshop was the alternatives the new media, especially the Internet, offers for publishing scholarly literature. The traditional publishing of serials is in a crisis, because of a number of factors:- Prices of journals are going up by 15-20% per year, while budgets of research libraries remain the same or are being cut.
- The appearance of digital journals and digital distribution technologies. At the moment of writing there are somewhere between 1500 and 1700 scholarly journals available in full text edition, mostly on the World Wide Web. Their number is increasing by the week. Moreover, they are integrated into bibliographic databases like Silverplatter, Ovid and Ebsco, to name the largest, which makes alternative forms of publishing not only possible, but already a reality.
- In principle, everything published on the Web is instantly available. This makes the old problems of distribution (printing, distributing, slowness) obsolete.
- In addition, the Web makes other forms of publishing possible: multimedia, (hyper)linked, various appearances of the same information, full-text archiving etcetera.
All this has caused the old roles in the chain of information to shift. This used to be split up in various roles:
Author > Publisher > Distributor > Library > Reader
There may have been more parties involved, but these were the basic roles. The distributor often was the publisher himself, but at times there was also an intermediate journal agency. In the light of the developments mentioned above, in the new situation created by electronic publishing the old divisions between the parties have shifted, mainly in the role of publishing and distribution, as these are no longer technical issues. In one form or another, this is a challenge or a threat to all parties involved in the traditional chain of information, which basically boils down to the following alternatives:
- Authors may publish their works directly on the web. They can do so themselves or with the help of a library, which then becomes a publisher (of university publications)
- On the other hand, both publishers and journal agencies may bypass the library and deliver contents to readers right away. Publishers can do so by making the full-text of their publications available through the World Wide Web (or on CD-ROM, but that is unusual). Intermediaries offer integrated searching and full-text retrieving services of all publications in their fund.
The threat for all parties, of course, is in the loss of their old position. The challenge is to take on a larger share of the information chain, without losing the old position. At the moment no one knows where this will lead us to, let alone where it will end. This has already led to rising insecurity, even if much of the information revolution everyone is awaiting still has to begin. In reaction to the threat and challenges, separate responses have evolved among the varios players in the field. All parties try to defend their old positions by pointing to the value they add to the nominal role they fulfil:
- Libraries claim added value they accrue in filtering information from the flood washing over their user group (usually universities)
- Publishers state that there is much more to publishing than printing, distributing and marketing. Their most important role is to facilitate the publishing process by (once again) adding a quality filter to the information offered for publication.
At the moment, the publisher role is under siege, though more in theory than in practice. Libraries are forced to adapt their traditional roles to start acting as information intermediaries, and if they do not their role will be marginalized to 'undergraduate support'. On the other hand, the ongoing rise in the prices of their products by publishers has led to a much fiercer attack and some endeavours of presenting real alternatives to the traditional publishing role. These alternative models also featured at the workshop. All participants were involved in one alternative publishing model or another. The immediate inspiration for the workshop was the foundation of a Dutch electronic academic publishing, called Roquade, by Delft University of Technology Library and the Library of Utrecht University (at the time of writing the URL was: http://131.211.208.56/roquade/).
Three issues
The workshop was chaired by Joost Kircz, Senior Visiting Scientist, University of Amsterdam and Director of Kircz KRA Publishing Research. Other participants included John W.T. Smith Subject Librarian, The Templeman Library, University of Kent at Canterbury; Tom Wilson Research Professor in Information Management, University of Sheffield; Michael Keller University Librarian, Stanford University, Publisher of Highwire Press; Julia Blixrud SPARC The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Fytton Rowland Deputy-Director of Undergraduate Programmes, Dept. Information Science, Loughborough University; and Bas Savenije Librarian, Utrecht University.
Their presentations and discussions focused on the following three issues:
1. The cost of first copy, that is, making a publication ready for publication, including peer reviewing and (copy) editing. Solutions for the first point, costs of first copy, or the actual step from the manuscript to the published work, were the most hotly debated. One participant put the general feeling into words by saying that there were some points of consensus, however:
- New publishing forms can break through the conservatism in academic publishing. This may be hard, because it impinges on vested interests, not only on the side of the publishers, but also on the side of the academic community. This is currently resulting in inertia;
- Everyone is so much accustomed to the old forms of publishing, and they are so important to the functioning of academia, they will remain important and must be a point of departure. On the other hand, the academies already pay for most of the costs involved in getting journals published, so it should not be too difficult to divert these efforts from the commercial publishers to not-for-profit publishing;
- The image of a journal is very important. Electronic publishing is not considered the equal to publishing in a traditional journal. To achieve good quality standards with new, electronic journals published by universities, several solutions were proposed:
- Publish everything on the web and let the readers be the judge of quality. For most this was no option, because they considered quality filtering to be the principal function of the publishers. These problems are most acute in the natural science fields and less in smaller fields, with less vested interests;
- Electronic publishing should be in not-for-profit enterprise form. This is a good solution as the involvement of academic institutions will keep prices reasonable (two examples: highwire, http://highwire.stanford.edu/ and SPARC, http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
2. Distribution, or getting published information to the readers. The contributors were all in agreement that the distribution of information is not really an issue: the World Wide Web is the medium, it works well and it is efficient. There were some questions about whether alternative models would not better serve the possibilities of the new media. The journal as a gateway to information, subject-based publishing or a cross-journal approach, http://www.stke.org/. In this, the issue at stake was less the actual distribution, but rather the merger of access, filtering, and publishing.
3. Archiving, or keeping digital information available over time. Some ideas about solutions for archiving electronic information were discussed, including distributed and commercial or semi-commercial, but no one had a full-fledged solution nor was there consensus about the best way in which archiving could be achieved.
The workshop was about publishing models, and did not come to conclusions. There have been a number of initiatives from the side of academia, but these are still in their infancy. However, when they take off, they will pose an interesting alternative to the market that is dominated by expensive printed journals.
The workshop provided some interesting insights, but it showed two strong biases. The first was in the virtually exclusive science approach. Many of the problems discussed are present in all scientific fields, but the natural sciences with their information overload, stress on fast communication, and near exclusive reliance on journals in scholarly communication are the most greatly affected. The second was a strong bias towards the Anglo-Saxon view of the question. While this is dominant in scholarly communication, there are many more sides to it. One of these is that commercial digital publishing (which for that matter also extends to bibliographic databases) is focusing nearly exclusively on Anglo-Saxon literature.
In addition to what was said about the role of Academia in digital publishing as a counterpoint to commercial interests is even more true of the role of digital academic publishing in the fields in which commercial publishing is not showing an interest. This includes many of the social sciences and nearly all of the humanities, as well as practically all non-Western or non-Western centred studies. *
Dr Rik Hoekstra is currently affiliated with the Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis (Institute for Netherlands History) in The Hague, Netherlands. He is occupied with publishing source materials concerning Dutch History in an electronic form.
E-mail: RikHoekstra@inghist.nl