Online Access Is Profoundly Changing Scientific Publishing

See rebuttal to this article. Scientific publishing is undergoing a profound change. Large and small, commercial and nonprofit publishers are beginning to shift journal delivery from paper to electronic and from library shelves to users' desktops. Without question, the electronic age is speeding up information access. For example, from a computer desktop in his or her office, a subscriber to the online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) can browse the latest issue shortly after it comes out each Friday, rather than waiting days or weeks for mail delivery. For readers in the Far East and Australia, this could mean months. Online delivery also offers significant savings in postage. 'MURKY FUTURE': American Chemical Society’s Robert Bovenschulte acknowledges the difficulty of predicting trends. Researchers who are too busy to browse the phone-book-sized issues of JBC, one of the most prestigious journals in science, can do a key word search on the JBC Web site (http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/) for articles back to 1995. Within the text of an article, a protein might have a hypertext link that will take a reader to the protein databank at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Citations at the end of the paper contain hypertext links to Medline abstracts, provided by the National Library of Medicine. And if the citations refer to recent JBC articles, a subscriber can link to the full text. As more scientific journals put their full texts online, readers will be able to do even more. "We think that eventually all journal articles and books will become a network of interlinked databases, continually updated with new articles linked to other articles," says Pieter Bolman, San Diego-based president of Academic Press, one of the largest commercial scientific publishers in the United States and a division of Harcourt Brace and Co. Last year, Academic Press put its 175 journals online in a database called IDEAL (http://192.215.52.3). For authors, the time lag in publication may be dramatically shortened by electronic publishing. Some people predict scientists will find wider audiences for their articles, especially those in more obscure journals. Others believe the nature, dynamics, and costs of scientific communication will change drastically. The potential effects of these coming changes are not yet certain. "All of us in professional and scholarly publishing are groping our way toward the murky future," observes Robert Bovenschulte, director of the publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).With 151,000 members, ACS is one of the world's largest scientific professional organizations. Despite the cloudy crystal ball, it's clear electronic publishing is impacting the scientific enterprise. The number of electronic journals and newsletters available online doubled last year. It has increased 15-fold since the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Research Libraries began tracking serials on the Internet in 1991 in its Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters. The directory is released each July. One of the earliest electronic full-text journals was Flora Online, an irregularly published peer-reviewed journal in systematic botany based in upstate New York. It was available free of charge by FTP beginning Jan. 12, 1987. The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, originally launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, began on July 1, 1992. It was later sold to Chapman and Hall, a division of the Thomson Co. of Canada, a large conglomerate of information companies (http://www.Thomson.com/ojcc/default.html). The Scientist was one of the first scientific periodicals available in full text, free of charge. It went on the Internet Nov. 9, 1992. Its biweekly files and archive now go back to the first issue of 1990. The complete conversion to HTML is expected by the end of the year, including issues from 1986 to 1989. Originally sponsored by the National Science Foundation as an experimental gopher site at AT&T, it became a Web site at the University of Pennsylvania Library in June 1995. In the most recent directory, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) listed nearly 1,700 serials online, about a third of which were scientific journals. 'STRIKING NOVELTY': Yale’s Ann Okerson notes the arrival of print publishers on the electronic scene. "The most striking novelty of [this] year, apart from sheer quantity, is the arrival on the electronic journal scene of a growing number of very serious major players: traditional print publishers now moving aggressively to bring their journals into cyberspace," wrote Ann Okerson, associate university librarian for collections development and management at Yale University, in the introduction to the 1996 edition of the ARL directory. "Academic Press, Blackwell Scientific, Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, ier, Institute of Physics, Johns Hopkins Press, Kluwer, MIT Press, and Oxford University Press are only some of the publishers whose titles are now becoming broadly available." Only the rare-and probably small-publisher will not have an Internet presence, observers predict. The number of online periodicals will continue to grow in 1997, according to publishing executives contacted by The Scientist. ACS aims to have all of its 26 journals and five magazines online by summer, Bovenschulte says. ier Science, the world's largest commercial publisher of scientific journals, plans to have 300 of its journals online by July. In addition, ier will make most of its 800 remaining titles available online by the end of the year, according to Karen Hunter, New York-based senior vice president. "The single most difficult thing for all of us is to adjust to changed media in a market where there isn't a lot of money to support it," Hunter says. "We are literally investing millions of dollars in online publishing." Many Internet pioneers anticipated that electronic publishing would be cheap or virtually free, since it eliminates the cost of paper, printing, distribution, and mailing. However, the economics of publishing, combined with the cost of gearing up electronically, seem likely to dash such hopes. Online access does indeed have its price. For some journals, the online version is less expensive but not cheap. The full contents of JBC, enhanced by the speed, efficiency, and convenience of electronic delivery, costs $200 for individual subscribers who are members of the Bethesda, Md.-based American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. By contrast, members pay $400 for a print subscription. The journal publishes 35,000 printed pages annually, according to Charles Hancock, journal manager and executive officer of the society, an affiliate of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). "We save money when people cancel print subscriptions," Hancock points out. "We save on printing, mailing, and binding costs. As time goes on, we will look at the pricing scheme again. People will switch to online as it becomes more widely accepted and more journals go online, but now they routinely prefer paper." As of early March, 424 members signed up for the online version, leaving about 600 still receiving paper. About 350 institutions, such as libraries, offer the online version, while about 4,400 libraries still stock the paper issues, according to Hancock. No one has calculated the cost of paper used to print out individual copies from users' local P.C.'s, but it is not insignificant. Many publishers of science, technology, and medical journals believe that electronic information is poised to become more, not less, expensive. In January, the earliest high-profile electronic journal projects on the Web began to charge nearly full subscription fees and in some cases a little more. So far, most traditional publishers see electronic publishing as an additional and supplemental archival service to the paper products, and different pricing models reflect variations in a diverse publishing business. FINDING THE RIGHT PRICE: Directory editor Larry Krumenaker says pricing policies are still evolving. "Companies have discovered electronic publishing, but they have not discovered a way to price it to go," comments Larry Krumenaker, editor of the Net.Journal Directory. Scheduled to be issued by Hillsdale, N.J.-based Hermograph Press (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hermograph) in April, the first edition of the directory will list nearly 10,000 periodical titles, many of which are scientific publications, with full-text viewing. Several hundred of these will be available for free. Some journals are free during the early, experimental months of going online, offering unlimited access or asking a user to register for free at the Web site. This year, ACS phased in subscription fees for three of its earliest electronic journal editions, the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Environmental Science & Technology. For members, the Internet edition price is $26 over the print subscription. But sometimes even paid online journals offer something for nothing. The full-service electronic edition of Science magazine, for example, costs $12 extra on top of the member subscription rate. Casual Web surfers, however, can see the table of contents and abstracts and can search for topics without charge. This is a widespread practice, followed by Cell Press, the American Society for Microbiology, and many others. Scientific publishing is big business, and the scientific publishing community is phasing in electronic publishing with revenue in mind. Large commercial publishers like ier Science belong to publicly held parent companies with steadily increasing stock prices and dividends per share. Nonprofit scientific societies, beholden to members instead of shareholders, shoulder most of the same kinds of costs, albeit on a different scale, to publish society journals. As nonprofits, they get certain breaks in postage and other costs. Regardless of print or electronic distribution, journals have certain fixed costs for providing the peer-review, editorial, and production services that make them so valuable and even prestigious. "The total 'first copy' cost of a science journal is between 70 [and] 80 percent of its operating costs, depending on the annual number of pages published and the complexity of the text," notes a review of publishing economics on the ACS Web page (http://www.acs.org/). Even electronic journals must go through these or similarly expensive first-copy steps. Publishing revenues come from only a few sources. For international commercial publishers like ier Science, libraries are essentially the primary source of revenue, according to Hunter. Some nonprofit societies may find additional revenue in subscriptions to individuals. For example, the American Society of Plant Physiologists divides its subscription base equally between libraries and members, explains publications director Melinda Carlson. Members can buy the journal Plant Physiology for $135 a year or Plant Cell for $110. To libraries, the society offers only a "bundled" subscription to both journals for $1,225. An additional modest fee is charged for the online version. Journals with a substantial individual subscriber base, such as Science and Nature, can find good income in advertising in print. Many expect to extend the revenue model online. "We're all experimenting, which is good and healthy," explains Maria Lebron, business manager of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "We have different audiences to serve, and we're looking for how best to serve them." Questions still remain, mostly posed by librarians, who have traditionally constituted the largest market for purchasing journals and the primary source for scientists of organized access to current and past issues. Who's going to archive the journals? Who will have access to the archives for research? New ways of doing business and even new businesses to serve users are beginning to emerge. For example, some journals are publishing electronically in cooperation with an entrepreneurial unit of Stanford University Library called HighWire Press. Concerned that only large commercial publishers like ier and Academic Press could afford to bring high-quality scientific content to the Internet, HighWire Press started up two years ago particularly to help scholarly societies and university presses leverage the new ways of producing customized electronic products without the daunting up-front costs, not to mention the reinvestment needed to keep pace with the fast-changing technology and tools. HighWire already hosts about 10 different journals, all using approximately the same electronic format. In addition to JBC and PNAS, HighWire hosts the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Neuroscience, and Pediatrics, and will soon launch journals of the American Physiological Society and other FASEB affiliates. All of these journals will share citation hyperlinks. Eventually, these and other journals will have to sell site licenses to institutions so that individuals won't have to negotiate access to separate files and systems. Annual Reviews Inc. has also signed up a few of its 25 review journals with HighWire, including Annual Review of Medicine. BROAD DISTRIBUTION: HighWire Press director John Sack notes that the Web theoretically gives instant visibility to research. "What an author wants is the broadest possible distribution for the research," observes HighWire director John Sack. "Theoretically, the Web gives instant visibility. We were concerned that authors might shift their allegiances and citations to the for-profit journals who afford high-quality electronic publishing." Another new venture, London-based BioMedNet (biomednet.com) offers a combination of advertiser-supported free services, such as searching a database and looking at abstracts, with a pay-per-view model for full-text journals. Owned by the private, London and Philadelphia-based company Current Science Group, BioMedNet now offers hypertext-linked full-text articles from 100 journals, mostly from other scholarly publishers, and aims to have 300 accessible by the end of the year. Journals from Karger of Switzerland are included, as well as British Medical Journal, Journal of Cell Science, and The Scientist. "You have to have consolidators to generate traffic at your Web site, and we perform that function for commercial and not-for-profit publishers," says Robert Ubell, president of the United States arm of BioMedNet. In less than a year, BioMedNet enrolled 62,000 members. Currently the service is essentially free, but there is a charge for downloading or printing most articles in full text. This is another version of many document-delivery services available, including CISTI of Canada (http://www.cisti.nrc.ca/cisti.html); OCLC (http://www.oclc.org) of Dublin, Ohio; and the Genuine Article service of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia (http://www.isinet.com). ISI and IBM also have developed a full-text delivery service tied into Current Contents. New York-based OVID (http://www.ovid.com) is another full-text provider, providing access to dozens of journals via library networks; it also identifies library holdings. Some people question the future of printed journals in the electronic age, forecasting that the virtual journal will be adopted as soon as the Web becomes easier to access. Others predict that journals will continue to exist as collections of articles on certain topics within certain scopes with a certain quality stamp. "Eventually, all things get published; the point is where they get published," says Academic Press's Bolman. "The prestige of being published widely under the strictest scrutiny of [one's] peers is the sort of thing that will remain. It's very innate to science and the people who do science." Carol Cruzan Morton is a freelance science journalist in El Cerrito, Calif., and a science writer at University of California, Davis, News Service.

Online Access Is Profoundly Changing Scientific Publishing

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