Use Of Electronic Preprints By Scientists Poses Challenges To Publishers

A growing number of researchers contend that the traditional scientific journal--with its peer-review gatekeeping and relatively high printing and mailing costs--is seeing its last days. From now on, they predict, researchers will use the Internet to directly disseminate their papers to each other as part of a more flexible system that will progressively replace print journals--and, perhaps, their publishers. But publishers, while acknowledging the power of Internet distribution, insist they will continue to play an important role in the future of scientific communications. INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS: Paul Ginsparg's home page links to his e-Print archive, a recent usage graph-showing a sharp drop at year-end holidays and an image of Ginsparg. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of all-electronic, publisher-free scientific communications is theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ginsparg maintains an archive of more than 40,000 electronic preprints and articles in several areas of physics, as well as under such subject headings as computation and language, bayesian analysis, economics, atmospheric-oceanic sciences, and nonlinear dynamics. Last month, Ginsparg received $1 million from the National Science Foundation to consolidate the archive and expand the concept into other areas of science. Software will be developed to provide such features as links to citations, images, and data, as well as a mechanism for commentary by readers. The "e-Print archive" (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) currently boasts about 25,000 users worldwide and 45,000 electronic transactions per day. Ginsparg and other supporters of direct digital communications among researchers say electronic preprints are part of an inevitable shift away from traditional publishing. In fact, at least one professional society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York, is considering facilitating such an electronic system. "We have a much more efficient communication system without intervention of the various middle people that have formerly been necessary because of the difficulties of production and distribution," declares Ginsparg. "We've taken over in a spectacularly efficient manner. Now, we're asking the conventional publishing companies, 'Okay, what is it that you actually do for us?' And the answer thus far has been, 'Not much.'" Representatives from scientific societies that publish journals say they hope to take advantage of the Internet to provide such services as digital journal archives, while continuing to provide the peer-review vetting of scientific results that many disciplines rely on for promotion and grant- award decisions. In the biological sciences and other fields, for reasons not immediately clear, researchers are not yet posting electronic preprints to the Internet in great numbers, giving publishers time to consider and adapt their policies to the advent of author-based production and distribution schemes like Ginsparg's. One major concern that the publishers have is loss of control over copyright of material that appears in their journals. Publishers say that allowing electronic preprints, as a form of prior publication, may undermine the value of their journals and result in declining subscriptions and revenue. They acknowledge, however, the growth in direct electronic communications between scientists. "This matter [of electronic preprints] hasn't come up yet," says Lewis I. Gidez, director of the office of publications for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) in Bethesda, Md., which publishes FASEB Journal. "But it's something that we'll have to address. In the future, if this becomes a widespread practice, this could have a negative effect on subscriptions." GOINGFORWARD: IEEE will "be hurting ourselves more than helping ourselves if we resist the trend" to electronic preprints, says Bill Hagen. Electronic preprint distribution and other forms of author- based Internet dissemination of scientific papers "really is turning on its head the whole concept of publication," according to Bill Hagen, manager of copyrights for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York, whose flagship publication, IEEE Spectrum, reaches about 300,000 members. "We're going to weaken our ability to serve the membership, and we're going to be hurting ourselves more than helping ourselves, if we resist the trend," Hagen says. "If we respond in an intelligent and productive way, we can move along with the technology and different ways of distributing information, but also retain some of the aspects of traditional publishers, such as peer review." "The paper medium [is] difficult to produce, difficult to distribute, difficult to archive, and difficult to copy," Ginsparg says. With the coming digital era, "that whole paradigm is doomed. The electronic format shares none of those features." Those charged with protecting the interests of publishers find themselves struggling with the question of whether to reject manuscripts submitted for publication that have also been posted to the Internet. IEEE's Hagen, for example, confesses to having a "philosophical problem" with telling potential authors that they cannot take advantage of technological advances to distribute their materials freely. The provisional policy on electronic preprints at IEEE is to accept for review material that has been previously distributed on the Internet, according to Hagen. Most professional societies in the biological sciences have not yet fully considered the issue of electronic preprints. "We haven't confronted it yet," says Charles C. Hancock, executive officer of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) in Washington. ASBMB publishes the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "We have the same policy [as other journal publishers] that you're not supposed to have prior publication of the same information. But we haven't considered it in the context of electronic preprints." Linda Illig, director of journals for the American Society for Microbiology, in Washington, also says that "we don't have, yet, an official policy on it." She adds: "My gut reaction would be that we would not permit it, that if somebody told us they had already done this that we would not consider the manuscript for publication." "In the field of physics, where the e-Print archives are well established, it would be instant suicide for the first journal to insist on its copyright privilege to sole distribution," says Ginsparg. "It would quickly lose further submissions." "ACM may sponsor an electronic manuscript posting-and-review server as an extension of the society's member services," says Peter J. Denning Among the professional societies forming policy on digital distribution is ACM, whose journals, including Communications of the ACM, reach more than 75,000 computer and physical scientists. Change in this direction is not only an inevitable development, but also a positive one, according to Peter J. Denning, chairman of ACM's publications board and chairman of the computer science department at George Mason University. ACM accepts materials previously posted to the Internet for possible publication in their print journals. Denning describes a new model for publication under discussion at ACM in which a paper might be posted to the Internet for organized comment and review by the electronic community instead of being published in a journal, per se, either electronic or paper. ACM is planning a digital library of all of its published journal literature, Denning says, and may sponsor this kind of manuscript tracking an extension of that service. "People could post preprints on our server, and we'd have some kind of a mechanism where other people could make comments on it," Denning explains. The public record of posted papers, critical comments, and possible rewrites would be carefully preserved in sequential order. "This kind of living, fluid journal much more closely reflects the way research actually works, rather than this thing that's frozen in form once and for all," Ginsparg says. Denning warns: "If we try to protect copyrighted documents with our lives, we will die."

Use Of Electronic Preprints By Scientists Poses Challenges To Publishers

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