PRINCIPLES FOR A NEW SYSTEM OF PUBLISHING FOR SCIENCE
David E. Shulenburger
Provost University of Kansas

The conviction is now widespread that the existing system of scholarly communication through traditional journals is breaking down. The most visible symptom of the breakdown is the inordinately rapid price inflation of journals and the resulting subscription cancellations by libraries. Below I delve into the economic reasons for the breakdown, outline the suggested remedies and convey a report on the elements of a proposed replacement system of scholarly communications arising out of a March 2000 meeting in Tempe, Arizona. The Peculiar Market for Scholarly CommunicationsThe function of price is to ration the available quantity of a good such that it ends up in the hands of those who have the ability and desire to purchase it. Market economies, by definition, use the market to set prices and to distribute goods. Rising prices for a good preclude the purchase of that good for some, but provide an incentive for producers to produce more. Ultimately, production of the good increases and price is reduced by competition and supply to the cost of producing additional units of the good.

To economists, scholarly journals and journal articles are "goods." In recent years their prices have risen significantly and the quantity of journal articles has also risen. According to the Association of Research Libraries, serials subscription prices in U.S. dollars rose 207% between 1986 and 1999. During the same period, Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory’s listing of titles increased by 55%. Is this increase in quantity-supplied evidence of a market moving toward equilibrium? Are we about to see falling prices in response to increasing supply? Perhaps. But if this is so I expect that such price behavior will occur in the long run, a period when, as Lord John Maynard Keynes observed, "We are all dead."

What keeps this market from having prices that respond to increased supply is its very nature. It is highly segmented, with the most prestigious segments being nearly completely price inelastic. These segments include those top few journals in each discipline that scholars and practitioners understand to be the repositories of the most carefully refereed literature. Publishing in one of these few journals on a repeated basis signals that an established scholar is among the elite; publishing a single article identifies a young scholar on a trajectory to join that elite. No reputable academic research institution in which the discipline is studied would seriously contemplate dropping a subscription to one of these journals.

It is not easy for a journal to enter this elite group. Because these journals publish what is acknowledged to be the best material in a field, new scholarship is sent there first and appears in journals in lower tiers only if it is first rejected by those in the top. Journals can rise into this top tier but it takes much time to develop top tier cachet. Generally, the route to the top is through the emergence of a new sub field that is not initially published in the established top journals; for example, the emergence of econometrics spawned journals that are now in the top tier of economics journals. Importantly, it is not head to head competition that generally leads to the emergence of a top tier journal but expansion of the field.

Inelastic demand permits one to raise prices with subscription quantity falling less rapidly than price rises. Profit margins can be increased when prices are in this range and increased profit margins can then be maintained. According to Brendan Wiley, the top four commercial publishers of scholarly journals, Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier, Wiley and Plenum had average net profit margins of 18.8% in 1997, compared with the U.S. Standard and Poor’s periodical industry net profit margin of 5%. Further, looking and focusing on only one of the four, Wiley observes: "According to Reed Elsevier's annual report, the operating margin of the scientific segment ran at 40.28% (1997), 41.77% (1996), and 39.66% (1995) as a percentage of sales. As a point of comparison, Microsoft's operating income as a percentage of sales was 45.17% for 1997, 35.50% in 1996, and 34.33% in 1995." Clearly, the leaders in the commercial segment of the industry have been able to develop abnormally high profits and maintain them overtime, an artifact consistent with relatively price inelastic markets.

But increased prices also can result from cost increases. Do price increases in this industry reflect cost increases? Undoubtedly some do. But if one examines an industry utilizing roughly the same technology to produce its product and finds that price increases are far less than in the serials industry, much doubt is cast on the thesis that price increases follow cost. According to the Association of Research Libraries, monograph prices were increased only 65% during the 1986 to 1999 period while the serials industry increased prices by 207%. When one examines profit margin and price performance data from a related industry, it appears that ability to set price, rather than cost, is driving price.

Recent research confirms that control over larger number of journal titles affects journal pricing. Mark McCabe concludes, "Briefly, our results for journals sold by commercial publishers indicate that prices are indeed positively related to firm portfolio size, and that mergers result in significant price increases." The many successful attempts by large commercial publishers of scholarly journals to acquire individual journal titles and to acquire other commercial publishers is consistent with the thesis that firm behavior is directed toward maintaining inelastic prices.

I am the provost of a research university, the University of Kansas, and chair of the Council on Academic Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, a council made up of the provosts of over 200 research universities. My concern and that of my colleagues is the effect of the price system on allocation of access to the research literature. At member libraries of the Association for Research Libraries, the number of serials subscriptions dropped 6% from 1986 to 1999, while the number of new monographs purchased dropped 26%. Thus, less scholarly material is being subscribed to in absolute terms. Furthermore, since the amount of scholarly material extant has increased, as the 55% increase in serials titles cited above demonstrates, faculty at Association for Research Libraries institutions have access to a reduced relative proportion of the scholarly literature than in 1986.

Since scholarly literature is the building block for new scientific discoveries, a prima facie case can easily be made that reduced access to the research literature reduces the potential for scientific progress. However, does reduced access through libraries equate to reduced access to the research literature altogether? There is abundant reason to doubt that the equation holds. For example, James Langer, the president of the American Physical Society, states that some of his colleagues, especially the string theorists, "for research purposes don’t need print journals at all." His colleagues rely on the Los Alamos server, a repository of unrefereed manuscripts. A common experience we all share is membership on list serves that present manuscripts reporting what colleagues in our own areas are doing. A search of any university website turns up manuscripts on many topics. This so-called "gray literature" provides access to scientists to much that is not owned or catalogued by our libraries.

But while the gray literature may provide access to material unavailable in one’s university library, it is not an acceptable substitute for library access to the scientific literature. The gray literature generally is not adequately indexed and archived such that one can systematically search or rely upon it as a repository of scientific information in the future. One can easily make the case that relying upon it as a source of transmitting and preserving the scientific literature will create great difficulties or impossibilities in accessing that literature in the future. (The author has cited some of the gray literature of the scholarly communications movement in footnotes. While web sites for this literature are accessible now, no assurance can be given that they will remain accessible 75 years into the future.) In addition, much of the gray literature is accessible only to those who are in certain social or professional networks. This system is hardly conducive to access to the literature by new scholars and scholars in the third world who are not privileged to have such access on their desktops.

Using price to ration access has resulted, in my view, in an inappropriate loss of access to the literature. Rationing by price is inappropriate when use of a good by one individual does not reduce its availability or utility to other individuals. Such is clearly the case with scholarly literature. Unlike physical goods, access to and knowledge of the scholarly literature may well increase the societal value of the good. Economists call such goods "public goods." An example of such a public good is the polio vaccine where increased access and use improves the lives of all those in the community. With goods whose public benefit is great, market societies often choose to either subsidize access or to make them available for free. Market- rationed access limits availability and reduces benefit.

It is especially curious that we have fallen into market-rationed access to scholarly communication because the public generally funds the production of the research that is reported in scholarly journals. The ultimate funding source may be a publicly-funded research grant, a taxpayer-funded institution, student-paid tuition, etc. The research costs are funded by the public, the results of that research are written by the scholars that produced the research, submitted to a journal and refereed by other scholars, and then given in total to a journal that edits it, publishes the manuscript in a journal, and then charges whatever price the market will bear for that research. Note that the journal is not constrained to charge for the value that it added to the article by the publishing process; it is able to charge for the full value of the article even though it added only a fraction to its value.

Logic of this sort led a group of Association of American Universities’ provosts to declare that the following principle should apply to scholarly literature: "Common ownership of goods… holds that research and scholarship are products of social collaborations and are assigned ultimately to the community." Because of this conviction and the generally held conclusion that it is inappropriate to ration scholarly literature by price, many proposals have been made and many efforts are underway in the United States to regain access to the literature for the community. Below I briefly describe some of those proposals and efforts. Proposed Remedies

• Increasing Library Budgets. While many institutions are doing this, few are succeeding in keeping up with cost increases; I know of none that is keeping up with the pace of additions to the literature. Increasing budgets is doomed to failure as a strategy for increasing access to scholarly literature if employed on a large scale because demand for key segments of the scholarly literature is price inelastic and the supply of top ranked journals in each field is also price inelastic. Increased budgets for library material will simply cause prices for scholarly journals to increase even more rapidly. It is clear that larger budgets will not cure this crisis.

• Preprint Servers. The most famous server is at Los Alamos and serves the physics community. Its cost for making the literature available to the community is only $1 per article. While it is a source of unrefereed material, it is very widely used by the community. Unfortunately, the widespread availability of literature through this source has not led libraries to drop subscriptions to physics journals. Thus, it has not reduced the libraries’ cost of accessing the literature.

• Open Archives Initiative. This initiative aims to create archives that are accessible and interoperable in order to efficiently distribute scholarly information. The effort grows out of e-print servers like the one in Los Alamos. At various sites, software that will enable institutions to place scholarly works on local servers and to have that material accessible worldwide as part of a virtual collection is in beta testing. The specifications for the system arose out of the Santa Fe convention, a meeting of knowledgeable parties held especially to establish such specifications.

• Minimal Refereeing Servers. The U.S. National Institutes of Health have put in place a resource called PubMed Central. One part of PubMed Central is a free electronic distribution source available to journals that choose to use it. The other part was a proposed minimal refereed service, which was supposed to make articles available to the biological/medical community in a manner similar to that of the Los Alamos server. The medical community in particular found unacceptable the distribution of any lightly refereed or unrefereed literature, especially if anyone could infer from the distribution source that it was "approved" by a government agency.

• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This coalition aims to provide alternatives to the commercial press and has spawned a number of ventures, among them are journal titles that directly compete with those published by large commercial houses. Other SPARC ventures attempt to keep the scholarly literature in society hands and make it more easily and usefully available to scientists. SPARC’s members provide a market for the products they spawn and help assure them of success. I sit on the Board of Directors of an innovative SPARC effort called BioOne. BioOne is an electronic collection of approximately 40 whole organism biology journals that will be made available electronically in a single, searchable package in March of 2001.

• Antitrust Activity. U.S. antitrust authorities have yet to initiate a major action against an anticompetitive move by large commercial journal publishers. The difficulty is the criteria used in pursuing cases. Generally, no publisher holds a proportion of the market sufficient to trigger action when it acquires another journal. The Association of Research Libraries has asked that the Justice Department investigate the proposed acquisition by Elsevier of a portion of Harcourt General, including Academic Press. I note that European antitrust authorities have successfully opposed some combinations.

• Decoupling. This is a proposal by a group of Association of American Universities’ provosts that disciplinary societies set up boards to referee manuscripts so that refereeing could be dissociated from publication. The logic is that faculty evaluation groups that decide issues of tenure, promotion, salary, etc., attach great prestige to authors whose papers have been accepted by top tier journals. The ability of a journal to transmit such value to those who publish in its pages in turn creates great demand for that journal. Providing a method of refereeing papers separate from the journal review process would break this chain and reduce the ability of the journal to create value for itself by refereeing faculty work. Many U.S. academics fear that decoupling would result in monopoly review processes by societies that might stifle creativity and reduce scientific progress. At this point no society has established a decoupled review process.

• Buying Cooperatives. Many library coalitions exist in the U.S. and elsewhere that aim to use the monopsony-like power of the associated libraries to offset the monopoly-like power of commercial publishers. Generally, such cooperatives are successful in moderating price increases or softening restrictive use clauses. Unfortunately the cooperatives’ members do not have the freedom to tell the suppliers of journals like Brain Research they will not buy the journal if their conditions are not met as such journals must be part of selected research library collections. Without this ultimate bargaining power, the cooperatives’ impact on prices is severely limited.

• NEAR (National Electronic Article Repository). NEAR is a proposal by the author of this paper that a publicly accessible repository be established into which all articles would be placed 90 days after journal publication. This proposal aims to limit the exclusive ownership of manuscripts by the journal to a 90-day period. Because those manuscripts would be freely available 90 days after publication, a journal's ability to raise prices would be limited as libraries could simply wait 90 days and have the articles for free. This is a conservative effort aimed at providing publishers sufficient revenue to cover the cost of refereeing, editing and publishing the journal but returning the remainder of value to the public.

• Author Boycott. As of April 1, 2001, more than 13,000 scientists have signed the following journal boycott pledge: " To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September, 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date." This effort incorporates elements from the PubMed Central and the NEAR efforts.

• Control of Societies by their Members. As faculty have become aware of the complex and serious problems confronting scholarly communications, they have begun to insist that their societies retain ownership of journals rather than selling them to commercial publishers and that the journals be operated and priced such that all journal revenue be used to support only the journal. Actions of this sort may keep the problem from growing worse, but will not cause prices of commercially owned journals to be reduced.

This impressive array of thought and activity reflects the discontent with the current scholarly communications system. Each of the activities/proposals has much individual merit. But one must be mindful of the words of H.L. Mencken: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." While any or all of them may have roles to play in the future of scholarly communications, they do not now form a system on which scholars can rely for distribution and preservation of scholarly communication. The effort to develop the parameters of such a system is described below. Development of Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly CommunicationsBecause of the widespread recognition of the severity of the problem, the Association of American Universities, The Association of Research Libraries, and the Merrill Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Kansas convened a gathering of knowledgeable university presidents, provosts, librarians, representatives of scholarly associations, librarians, heads of university presses and representatives from the ARL and AAU to attempt to establish principles that should govern a new system of scholarly communications. Only representatives of the academy were invited, as our aim was to describe the conditions creating a scholarly communications system that would serve the academy.

The gathering produced the following principles that were agreed to unanimously by the participants. The Association of American Universities, the Council on Academic Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges and the Association of Research Libraries have endorsed it for discussion on university campuses during this academic year. Many vigorous discussions have already been held and there is much support for the principles in the U.S. academy.

The Principles certainly are applicable beyond the boundaries of the United States. In fact, as the scholarly communications system is worldwide, solutions must be also. I am very pleased for the opportunity to report the Principles to this conference in the hope that they will lead to development of a new worldwide scholarly communication system. The verbatim principles and accompanying text as adopted by the signatories are reproduced here.

Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing

May 10, 2000

The following set of principles was agreed to by the undersigned individuals as a result of a meeting held in Tempe, Arizona, on March 2-4, 2000. Sponsored by the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center of the University of Kansas, the meeting was held to facilitate discussion among the various academic stakeholders in the scholarly publishing process and to build consensus on a set of principles that could guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system.

The creation, dissemination, and application of new knowledge are fundamental to the development of an informed citizenry and a healthy global economy. Institutions of higher education exist to fulfill these functions. From the lab to the classroom to industry to the public, the advancement of knowledge through research and teaching is an invaluable contribution made by higher education to the public good. Scholarly publishing is the process through which newly discovered knowledge is refined, certified, distributed to, and preserved for researchers, professors, students and the public.

The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain. The increasing volume and costs of scholarly publications, particularly in science, technology, and medicine (STM), are making it impossible for libraries and their institutions to support the collection needs of their current and future faculty and students. Moreover, the pressure on library budgets from STM journal prices has contributed to the difficulty of academic publishers in the humanities and social sciences, primarily scholarly societies and university presses, to publish specialized monograph-length work or to find the funds to invest in the migration to digital publishing systems. Numerous studies, conferences, and roundtable discussions over the past decade have analyzed the underlying causes and recommended solutions to the scholarly publishing crisis. Many new publishing models have emerged. A lack of consensus and concerted action by the academic community, however, continues to allow the escalation of prices and volume.

The participants in the Tempe conference came together with the hope of building consensus on a set of principles that would inform the design and evaluation of new systems of scholarly publishing. The goal was to provide guidance while leaving open to creativity and market forces the actual development of such systems. The following set of principles is the result of their discussions. While the principles and their explanations reflect a North American perspective, the participants recognize that the advancement of knowledge and scholarly publishing are international enterprises. While the academic community in North America may agree on collective action, international discussion and support will be needed for the success of any new systems.

The participants encourage broad discussion and endorsement of these principles by institutions of higher education, scholars, scholarly societies, and scholarly publishers. Endorsement carries with it the commitment to implement local actions that will bring institutions of higher education closer to the goal of providing access to all relevant published research across all disciplines to all faculty by way of systems that ensure dependable management and affordable access to information over time.

• The cost to the academy of published research should be contained so that access to relevant research publications for faculty and students can be maintained and even expanded. Members of the university community should collaborate to develop strategies that further this end. Faculty participation is essential to the success of this process.

With the creation, dissemination, and application of new knowledge central to their mission, institutions of higher education must work to create systems that will provide affordable access to all relevant published scholarship across all disciplines for researchers, teachers, and the broader public. To do this, faculty, university administrators and professional societies must work together to create the systems that will contain, and in some cases, reduce substantially the costs of scholarly publishing. Since every faculty member should have access to all the relevant published research in her/his area, it is imperative that we find ways to bring down the cost to accommodate the expanding volume of publication within available budgets. The business arrangements of the journals for which faculty write, edit, and review must become a major focus of contributors, editors and readers if scholarly publication is to become affordable again.

Containing costs might be accomplished over time within the current configuration of scholarly communication through the effective use of technology to streamline publishing functions, while increasing access and value. Such systems have been developed within the not-for-profit community by Stanford University's HighWire Press and The Johns Hopkins University's Project Muse; other efforts, such as BioOne, are being facilitated by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. One could also envision systems that would build peer-review and abstracting and indexing functions on discipline- or institution-based e-print services. Such a system is being promoted by the Open Archives initiative, an effort that strives for compatibility among e-print services. Cost-containment should also continue through library consortial purchasing of electronic resources, a strategy that appears to be effective in lowering the unit costs of electronic information. Whatever the solution(s), cost must be made to fit within available budgets or the system will fail to provide the information to scholars that they need.  

• Electronic capabilities should be used, among other things, to: provide wide access to scholarship, encourage interdisciplinary research, and enhance inter-operability and search ability. Development of common standards will be particularly important in the electronic environment.  

  With the growing volume of scholarly research, it is increasingly difficult to uncover all of the relevant material published on a given subject. As more scholarship becomes available in digital form, this problem can be surmounted through powerful search systems, provided that commercial, technical and legal constraints do not prohibit such searches. Searching, navigation, and linking across titles and across disciplines is essential since many disciplines have multiple titles that serve them and many problems have multidisciplinary aspects that may lead a researcher to publications in fields as diverse as microbiology, law, economics, and internal medicine. The development of standards is critical to the implementation of cornfield searching and navigation. In addition, given the importance of older literature to the advancement of new knowledge, retrospective works should be digitized and made accessible online.  

• Scholarly publications must be archived in a secure manner so as to remain permanently available and, in the case of electronic works, a permanent identifier for citation and linking should be provided.  

  The advancement of knowledge is dependent on access to prior scholarship. While research libraries, with significant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, have made significant progress in preserving print publications, there is still a large proportion of unique printed material yet to be treated and a number of additional formats, such as videotapes, sound recordings, and film, whose preservation needs have yet to be addressed in any significant way. Electronic publishing adds yet another set of complex issues to the archiving and preservation of scholarly works. With libraries no longer owning copies and with the fragility of the electronic media, questions of what should be archived by whom and how are critical issues that need to be addressed. Despite many unanswered questions and unknown costs, archiving and preserving scholarly publications in all media are critical to any credible system of scholarly publication.  

• The system of scholarly publication must continue to include processes for evaluating the quality of scholarly work and every publication should provide the reader with information about evaluation the work has undergone.  

  The academic community relies on the judgment of peers when assessing the quality of faculty work. While core archival journals are expected to preserve the peer-review process, the scholarly community recognizes that the exact nature and methodology of quality assessment varies by discipline. Any evolving system of scholarly publication should allow for an evaluation process to take place as appropriate and should provide a transparent mechanism that informs the reader - an expert, a student, the public - of the nature of the evaluation the work has undergone in its various versions. This recommendation recognizes the development of discipline- or institution-based collections of articles which may go through different stages of review and where neither the hierarchy of existing journals nor the reputation of the publisher may exist as a signature of quality assessment.  

• The academic community embraces the concepts of copyright and fair use and seeks a balance in the interest of owners and users in the digital environment. Universities, colleges, and especially their faculties should manage copyright and its limitations and exceptions in a manner that assures the faculty access to and use of their own published works in their research and teaching.  

  The role of copyright is central to the academic community's mission of advancing knowledge. Members of the community are both creators and consumers of scholarly publications. As creators, faculty depend on copyright to protect the integrity of their work and on fair use to be able to use and incorporate the works of others with attribution in their own work. By tradition, faculty have transferred without direct compensation all of their copyrights to journal publishers in return for the wide distribution of their work. In some cases this tradition has resulted in the need for faculty to seek permission and pay a fee to use their own work in their research and teaching. If the academic community is to achieve its mission of advancing knowledge, it is critical that faculty authors retain the rights to use their own works in their teaching and in subsequent publications. Widespread adoption of university policies requiring faculty to retain such rights could provide individual faculty with the bargaining power to negotiate such agreements with publishers.

  While this document concentrates on copyright and fair use of scholarly works, the importance of copyright and fair use go well beyond the scholarly publishing system. It is imperative that the academic community monitor and critically examine any new license arrangements or proposed legislation (whether it be copyright amendments or any body of law affecting intellectual property directly or indirectly) and take appropriate action to make sure that such arrangements or legislation do not upset the balance between owners' rights and users' exceptions to them that has been achieved in copyright law with its provisions for fair use and library and educational exemptions.  

• In negotiating publishing agreements, faculty should assign the rights to their work in a manner that promotes the ready use of their work and choose journals that support the goal of making scholarly publications available at reasonable cost.

By judiciously assigning the rights to their work, faculty members can help assure that scholarship remains affordably available to the community. In the publication process, faculty can choose to publish in journals whose access and pricing policies make their work easily and affordably available. All faculty members should know the cost of journals to libraries and should consider refraining from submitting their work and assigning copyright to expensive journals when high quality inexpensive publication outlets are available. In fields where alternatives do not exist, universities and scholarly societies should work with faculty to develop such outlets.  

• The time from submission to publication should be reduced in a manner consistent with the requirements for quality control.  

  In rapidly evolving fields, lags of 12 months or more mean that scholarly history rather than cutting-edge research is the subject of publication. If published scholarship is to be a useful building block, it is imperative that the lag between submission and publication be shortened as much as possible for each field. While a number of factors contribute to the lag - peer review, author's changes, back and forth with editors - and are important to the quality of the final work, technology should be exploited to speed up the process where possible. For example, some journals have already designed systems that select reviewers based on workload and availability. In addition, a number of disciplines depend on e-print systems for quick distribution of their work.  

• To assure quality and reduce proliferation of publications, the evaluation of faculty should place a greater emphasis on quality of publications and a reduced emphasis on quantity.  

  While a fundamental factor contributing to the rapid increase in the volume of published research is the rapid expansion of knowledge, the academic credentialing system encourages faculty to publish some work that may add little to the body of knowledge. In the spirit of creating an environment that reduces emphasis on quantity across the system and frees faculty time for more valuable endeavors, faculty in research institutions should base their evaluation of colleagues on the quality of and contribution made by a small, fixed number of published works, allowing the review to emphasize quality. This de-emphasis of quantitative measures could moderate the rate of increase in new titles and numbers of articles published. Some universities have already modified faculty evaluation in this manner and federal granting agencies, such as the NIH, have implemented policies to limit the number of articles cited in the grant application process.  

• In electronic as well as print environments, scholars and students should be assured privacy with regard to their use of materials.  

  The digital environment, in particular, makes it very easy to obtain data on users and use patterns, information that can have great marketing appeal. It is incumbent on the academic community to assure the privacy of individual users with regard to their use of scholarly publications or other source materials made available through our institutions, consistent with state and federal laws.

Signatories to
Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing

Introduction

Are fundamental shifts taking place in how we scientists behave, organise ourselves, communicate and interact as a result of electronic technologies? Is it true that we are witnessing "a paradigm shift from the traditional, old fashioned print publication system, directly descended from 15th century Gutenberg, to a pioneering, telematic-based system of science communication" (Brown 1998)? Is this new powerful system really aimed at meeting the needs of everybody, including the traditionally "information- poor"? The answers to such questions may have a crucial bearing on the scientific enterprise and, more broadly, on the future of our relations with society. However, often the debate is conducted on parochial grounds, from the narrow standpoints of the individual stakeholders, and the ensuing conclusions can hardly serve the best interests of the scientific community, nor of society and culture at large. By gathering a broader selection of these stakeholders, the present conference provides an invaluable forum for the much needed collective reflection and debate on these matters.

It is certainly too early to arrive at definitive conclusions, as many important changes proceed at such a rapid pace. The first indications from some studies, however, suggest that a number of widely held assumptions about the nature and prospects of "virtual society" in general need to be revisited (see e.g. Woolgar 2000) and, as we intend to show here, this applies in particular to some of the promises and assumptions made about electronic publishing in science. Electronic technologies seem not always to affect us to the extent or in the direction we imagined or we were promised. For one thing, popular declarations that technologies will substitute for major social functions, contrast with the finding that they more often augment existing practice. The possible directions of the internet, in particular, are recognized to be strongly shaped by path dependencies in technology, accumulation of economic and political power and durability of social and cultural traditions. These kinds of counter-finding should allow us to objectively distinguish between the promise and the reality of life in the modern communications era, and they ought to help us make more realistic assessments of the advantages and potentialities of the new technologies in the world of science.

1. The paperless and the wireless society

Both Alice and Elmont are homeless in Washington, DC.
Alice approaches Elmont who is sitting on a park bench, to ask him if he'd like
to go for some soup. He tells her to be quiet as he is scrolling through his email.
There is a pause, and then Alice asks, 'Don't you need a computer for that?'
Elmont replies, 'Possibly. Researchers still aren't sure.'

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, February 1995.

Science fiction continues to inform future thinking. We live in a future- oriented society, as Sally Wyatt (2000) notes: "just as winners get to write (past) history, present-day actors attempt to write tomorrow's history, largely as a way of attempting to secure their current positions". This is particularly true for the internet, which unleashes all sorts of futuristic fantasy and speculation. But of course, history still matters because it makes some futures more plausible than others.

Not more than 20 years ago (Lancaster 1982), the paperless society was promised to us - to scientists, in particular - for the end of last century. And indeed in 1997 - barely four years ago- -there was suddenly a multitude of options for electronic journal literature from primary and secondary publishers, subscription agents and aggregators. Over the previous decade many libraries in industrialized countries, and a few in the rest of the world, had chosen to subscribe to one or more abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, which included the full text of articles in the database (either on CD-ROM or via the Web), thereby simplifying the process of providing their patrons with the journal literature. Progress in providing the full electronic journals, however, had been slower during that period; it had been noted that although electronic products might offer more information and articles than a library can acquire through print subscriptions, libraries seeking to replace their print subscriptions with electronic alternatives needed to consider that the options are not necessarily equivalent (Ogburn 1997).

Still today, the electronic and print versions of journals are not necessarily equivalent, and there are good reasons for making them different. Collection oriented academic research librarians are thus faced with offering the convenience of access to the content, at the possible expense of an archival copy for future reference. According to a fairly recent study (Vézina and Sévigny 1999) most actors in the world of scholarly documentation (authors, editors, librarians and readers) seem to agree that the printed copy is still useful and should be kept for a long period of time (if not forever), whilst the electronic version has become essential and should be used also to develop new services for end-users.

To this one should add other obstacles and constraints that make of electronic archiving and preservation of scientific material a still unresolved issue, such as: the non-existence of some relevant titles in electronic form (e.g. Brown 1998), the lack of technical support and reliable electronic infrastructure, and the uncertainty faced by libraries and end-users about future access - even to previously paid subscriptions. Under such circumstances, the transition from the paper to the digital world sounds as hardly realistic.

In addition, there are day-to-day practical obstacles: libraries seem to resent having a mix of titles forced on them in a bundle which includes the publishers' main titles, and having to cope with a variety of search protocols and authentication systems required by different distributors. So we see that even the big commercial publishers offer e-mail alerting services that send journal tables of contents directly to a reader's PC, "to provide the very latest information on soon-to-be-published papers and thus allow readers to reserve issues in their library" (Elsevier 2001).

There is, furthermore, some debate about the future proliferation of interface devices: a world in which the computer remains the dominant interface is seen as a North American one; whereas a world with a multiplicity of access devices looks more European, and a world with an uncertainty as to access at all is still the dominant perspective in most other countries around the globe. This raises different questions: What kinds of services will work well on what kinds of devices, at what costs, and for whom? Content is increasingly becoming tied in with access means; how will it be offered and/or sold?

And then, at a time when paper still does not show signs of disappearing, comes the new technological generation, that of the mobile or cellular phones and wireless communications based on packet switching, with its alluring promise of a worldwide instantaneous information distribution that recognizes no geographical or physical barriers. "People are going to stop carrying around things like laptops", it is said (Marks 2000); more and more devices are going to fit in your pocket. Indeed, we should not be surprised to see some laptop owners shifting to i-mode communicators pretty soon. Yet even for the community of scientists and scholars, who admittedly have been quite privileged in terms of modern communications, it is difficult to imagine that such expensive wireless communications will be made worldwide available in the near future. And, one should further ask: What about those who never had a laptop - or who have lived in an essentially paperless world? Would they be expected to double-leapfrog into this new paper- and wireless society?

Although many of the aforementioned constraints may be just transitory, it is becoming clear (once more) that new technologies tend to supplement rather than replace or correct existing practices and organisations. Against the common assumption that electronic technologies supersede existing activities and arrangements, research shows that the new technologies tend to be used in addition to, and alongside, old ones. The much boasted "paperless office" seems more illusory now than a few years back.

ii) Worldwide access to scientific knowledge and information

The web environment introduces in principle a new dimension in scientific communication and information, by functioning as a giant network that lends itself to linking people, documents and data, individually and in groups. Web-based community services are offering a plethora of appealing facilities. Scholars are becoming attracted by the idea of accessing information from their own desktop on a twenty-four hour basis, with instant local printout, immediate updating of information, modern navigational facilities and a general saving in time.

There is talk of the "empowerment" of the scientist as end user (Brown 1998), whilst the librarians' role is seen increasingly as that of a support service for the most efficient way of providing users with the information they want. There is no need to buy all the content of a particular journal because only a small proportion of the articles is required by every scientist - to whom the library budget could probably even be devolved, as part of this empowerment process.

Surfing the net with the purpose of identifying information-rich sources of data has become indeed a growing feature of end-user behaviour. However, this is not to say scientists are fully using the advantages of the electronic tools and technologies to communicate scientific knowledge (aside from the use of personal e-mail communication for this purpose); the electronic means serve rather for distribution and access to otherwise print publications (preprints, papers and reprints) and to data banks. In fact, there is still little clarity about the extent to which scientific knowledge - as distinct from scientific information and data - can be communicated by such means. The experiences with long-distance education and communication with other sectors will probably provide useful insight into these matters.

Further, it is not certain that the net with all its services that are to a large extent public at present (including the use of email, which is by far the most frequent activity via the net) will always be there for free. The signs are that the current rate of straightforward rapid expansion of internet usage will not continue (Woolgar 2000), and there are in fact some early indications of fatigue and disenchantment (El País 2000). Large numbers of young people - including students - have stopped using the internet, in those countries where usage has been more intensive; it has ceased being a novelty and people look for less virtual ways to communicate, read, play, or go shopping. Of course, those former users who can afford it, may "come back to" the internet, perhaps with the third-generation mobiles. But the fact is that on the whole, the internet has a commercial orientation and is mostly used for the search of merchandise, trips, entertainment and general information; its success is tightly linked to the expected commercial profits, which lately have shown clear signs of dwindling.

On the other side, there are still those who have never used the internet: at present (January 2001), whilst 90% of internauts are in industrialized countries, and 57% of them in North America (US and Canada), barely 1% are in Africa and the Middle East. For scientists and scholars, the distribution of percentages does not seem to be substantially different.

Table I gives a rough idea of the situation in Africa regarding internet facilities, both in the only five countries having in 1998 over 500 000 telephone lines, and in the one country which had less than 10,000 telephone lines (ISA 1998). Still in 1999, Liberia and Sudan reported no internet hosts, and another ten countries around the world had only one host (ISC 2000), whilst in the USA there were over 53 million of them.

We should not forget that internet connection still requires a telephone line, and at least 80% of the world population does not have access to one. In dozens of countries there is less than one line for every 100 inhabitants, and most of these countries are in Africa. In Cameroon, Mozambique and Tanzania, there was in 1998 only one institution with email access, with no connection to the library. At a university in Algeria with only one email terminal, staff members were expected to type their message on diskette and give them to the system administrator to be sent. Often in these countries the access modem is extremely slow and the server is very busy, which makes it difficult to download material from the internet.

Financial constraints on widespread use of the internet are evident. In several countries in Africa and Asia, university authorities give restricted net access to heads of department or senior staff via shared terminals "because dial-up access is expensive" (Lund 1998). Communications in countries in Africa with a very low average income level can be even more expensive than in rich countries, with local call charges costing more than US$4.-/hr in Guinea, Mauritania and Sierra Leone (ISA 1998).

Political and other external events may also have a disastrous effect on communication facilities in some developing countries: for instance, during the political crisis in 1997 the internet system in Sierra Leone University became completely inoperable because the system's operators had fled to nearby countries.

The sentence so often pronounced by aid agencies and their consultants, to the effect that "computers and telecommunications... provide an unprecedented opportunity for rapidly narrowing the gap between the information rich and the information poor" (e.g. Lancaster 1984), is a persistent fallacy. The most we can expect is that they narrow the gap "between the information rich in the West and their less well-informed equivalents in the Third World" (Olden 1987), allowing the latter to become part of the globalized information elite. In some countries in Africa, where literate people have always been an elite, computer-literates and those they serve will be a super-elite.

In addition, one should bear in mind that often the use of high technology in less developed countries produces new forms of dependence rather than enlarging independent capacity. Which is not to mean that Africans and people from other developing countries do not need the new information technologies: they do, but of the kind that local information professionals and users can understand, maintain, nurture, develop and ultimately internalize (Tiamiyu 1989). This applies in particular to the use of the new electronic technologies in science; we shall come back to this point under section 5.

3. Dropping journal subscription costs

Last but not least, there are those who, even being connected, cannot afford to pay for the information, and who apparently constitute a growing group.

Indeed, for many scholars electronic publication has failed to address the problem of accessibility: one of its promises, lower costs (irrespective of who has to pay them in the end), has simply not happened. There are strong indications, in fact, that consumers - scholars, their libraries, and their institutions - are paying for the development of electronic versions of scholarly information (Create Change 2000).

It is useful to recall that as late as the 1960s, scholarly communication was still part of an academic tradition. It was a manageable system, in which academics reported their discoveries, scholarly societies added value by vetting publications for quality, editing and publishing them, and libraries did most of the disseminating of the results. Then came a period of enormous growth in the scholarly and educational environment, first and foremost in industrialized countries and later, to a lesser extent, in most of the rest of the world. The pressure on faculty to publish and to get research support through grants also increased, and the quantity of research grew beyond the capacity of the scholarly publication system.

Commercial publishers then entered the scene, and began to absorb an increasing share of scholarly publication. With this stimulus, existing journals expanded and new journals were formed to accommodate the growing quantity of research in increasingly specialized areas. At the same time, information was starting to be viewed as a commodity that could produce profits for commercial publishers. Not-for-profit publishers began to see commercial publication as a way to manage precarious finances and weak publishing infrastructures and get rid of high overhead operations while still retaining quality control. Faculty were happy to see their chances to win tenure and promotion enhanced through publication and through appointment to editorial boards. The whole sense of journal publishing changed as scientists' interest shifted away from the readers' end and closer to the authors' end.

But already in the late 1970s there were the first signs that this scholarly communication system had to be maintained at a high cost, and by the mid-1980s cancellations of journals and reductions in other kinds of library purchases took place in many libraries. A chronic cycle started: cancellations caused higher prices and higher prices drove more libraries to cancel more journals. The dramatic increases in journal costs of scholarly publishing have in fact reduced scholars' access to essential research resources all over the world. Libraries simply cannot afford to keep up with the costs for commercially published journals, which are typically three to seven times as high as society or not-for-profit journals. A few recent figures (most of them taken from Create Change 2000) may serve to illustrate the situation.

Though the number of journals published worldwide has doubled in the last fifteen years, North American academic research libraries actually reduced their journal acquisitions, on average, by over 6% during the same period. During the twelve-year period ending in 1999, the unit cost of library subscriptions to scholarly journals increased by 9.0% per year (leading to a cumulative of 206%, in contrast to the 52% increase in USA consumer prices). Interlibrary borrowing among North American research libraries shot up 122.2% for the period 1989-1999 (8.3% annually); this increase suggests that scholars are having to depend on access from other libraries more and more.

Similarly, a recent report from Australia documents a 43.7% decline in total journal subscriptions for 38 university libraries between 1993 and 1998. During one recent year, 24 Canadian libraries cancelled $4.34 million (Canadian) in journal subscriptions.

The central library system of UNAM in Mexico, one of the largest university libraries in Latin America, has been forced to cut journal subscriptions, and book acquisitions by an even larger percentage, despite a considerable budget that has increased year by year. Librarians have been subject to pressure to buy electronic subscriptions in addition to the corresponding print versions, plus subscriptions to new electronic-only titles. It soon turned out that the titles offered initially for free or at low cost became expensive. Yet the library system has made an effort to maintain subscriptions to as many titles as possible, as academic staff and students are expecting to benefit from the conveniences offered by digital journal libraries and databases. For the time being, the ongoing changes in these services, merging of companies, appearance of new aggregators, etc., are resulting in frequent deficiencies in the provision of services to the end-user, despite the high costs paid.

Scholarly communication has become indeed an important business for commercial publishers, and mergers cause prices to rise even higher as competition decreases. Since 1995, eleven of the most expensive STM (science, technology and medicine) journals have shown a yearly increase of 10.6%; a library subscribing to just these eleven titles currently pays out $86,000 per year. The margin for commercial scholarly publishers is far higher than the median for all publishers, which is around 5% per year. The scientific and medical divisions of these companies seem to be the most profitable, with one company's science division operating with a 35-40% margin. Only the arts and humanities, where non-commercial publishers still dominate, regularly posted gains of less than 10% per year during the past decade.

There is a perception among some librarians that publishers of scientific journals could readily reduce their subscription prices by selling advertising. However, as remarked by Tagler (2000), advertisers speak with their spending power, and also their funds are limited. The majority of scholarly research journals have low circulation levels in the range of 400 to 1500, with an international spread of readers and with most of the subscriptions sold to libraries; hence their little chance of having a significant advertising revenue stream. Although there is still new ground to be covered in exploring the possibilities of web advertising, there are no strong reasons to believe that it will help to substantially reduce subscription prices of electronic journals having a limited readership.

The other side of the coin is no less dramatic: most learned societies have faced steady declines in library subscriptions during the past twenty years or more, at a rate of roughly 3% per year (Langer 2000). This is starting to force scholarly societies to revise their editorial policies and to reevaluate the roles of their journals and of the societies themselves.

This situation has its cruel ironies: universities pay to subsidize faculty research and then pay huge sums of money to buy the results back in the form of published content. A group of French specialists (Seminaire Villeurbanne 1997) argues that "we should answer ourselves the following, according to the nature of the text (commercial or not): Does the author write with the idea of selling his text? Is there a potential market ready to buy his text? If the answers are in the negative, it would be convenient for him to either pay for the publication, or post it as a preprint, or distribute it by electronic means to the potentially interested persons."

Probably much effort and money could be saved if our scientists and their institutions undertook a serious revision of the purpose of publishing. The scholarly and scientific communities are starting to respond in a more or less organized way to the present critical situation, not by undertaking such revision but at least by subjecting a variety of alternatives to discussion or promoting their implementation, such as (Create Change 2000; see also Shulenburger 2001):

• Creating competition to commercially published journals
• Creating more venues for scholars to communicate outside of commercial publications
• Supporting the self-publishing programs of scholarly societies
• Fostering alternatives to the current practice of surrendering intellectual property rights to publishers
• Fostering changes in the faculty peer review system that will promote greater availability of scholarly research: these changes might include movement away from quantity and toward quality as a criterion for tenure and promotion.

In this connection, it is estimated (Steele 1998) that the diversion of just a small proportion of the annual purchasing power of the libraries of universities in industrialized countries could create and fund on a recurrent basis the necessary academic electronic information/article data banks. A related concern has led to important efforts to provide free access to literature and data, such as the well-known Pub Med system in the medical field, or the Public Library of Science (PLS 2001), a project launched with the support of scholars and editors for on-line public libraries of science to provide unrestricted free access to the integrated and interlinked archives of scientific research.

4. Organizing the information chaos

There are of course other arguments in addition to the financial ones, for undertaking a serious revision of the purpose of publishing. Before the emergence of the internet, in the late 60's, there was a widespread concern among scientists and editors caused by the rapid (incorrectly called exponential) growth of the number of papers and journal titles, and a few attempts were made to bring some order and rationality into the picture by merging certain titles and cancelling others. Then, however, came the apparently limitless possibilities opened up by the modern technologies, which somehow interfered with those good intentions. Against many odds, scientific journals have continued to proliferate - at a much greater pace than the number of scientists-, beyond any planning and without responding to any strategy. Do we know, does anybody know what scientific journals are there for? Have science historians, sociologists of science, information scientists, reached any clear conclusion - or has at least any user group evaluated scientific periodical use systematically over a long period of time?

Under the present financial strain, referred to in the previous section, differences in values among key actors in the scholarly publication system have become more clearly manifest. Stead (1997) refers specifically to the different views held by scientists and librarians - not to speak of commercial publishers - of the role that journals play in the process of scholarly communication: whilst scientific societies' stated top priority is to preserve the archival record or research in their disciplines, a more cynical view is that these journals are principally a service to scientists in their quest for tenure, promotion and grants.

Indeed, a large number of papers are published as a result of the authors' necessity to be seen to be active and productive, as opposed to their genuine desire to communicate new, original and useful research findings. There can be little doubt that the primary stimulus behind this excessive publication remains the pressure to publish experienced by academics. A study based on a survey of over 200 journal editors in the areas of geology, physics, sociology and information science (Anderson 1997) found a high percentage of editors reporting fragmented publications (84%) in the physical sciences and duplicate articles (81%) in the social sciences - despite guidelines for authors normally warning against submittal of excessive articles. Studies as this one show that excessive publication is an issue of current and, apparently, growing concern within the editorial process.

It is largely admitted that huge numbers of articles published in science journals are probably never read by anyone, yet scientific societies seem to care little about this. Consider the following statements of the American Chemical Society:

• Journal publishers have had to increase the number of pages published and add new titles,
• Science journals, embodying the permanent archive of science, must not respond to the vagaries of the marketplace,
• Any loss of subscriptions causes a proportionate increase in the cost of the remaining subscriptions,
• If science journals fail, a vital archival resource may be lost, and
• For scientific society publishers... the mandate remains clear: the archives of science must contain all the quality research within the discipline that is validated for the record by peer-review and publication.

Whatever their reasons for wanting all this research published, scientists and librarians are at cross purposes; the latter have no business buying articles that their students and faculty do not need. One could ask, with Ginsparg (1996), "do publishers add so much essential 'added value' that we should all be willing to pay big bucks for it?"

One could further ask: Must every paper be treated equally? Just as libraries decide which publications are important enough to be held locally and which can be made available through interlibrary loan or electronic access, so would scientific societies and institutions do well to decide what to publish and what to maintain some other way.

In today's liberal economy, the market tailors products to what the research libraries can (hardly) afford. But who says that these products are adequate? Researchers, librarians and scientific societies should work jointly to develop better and more cost-effective systems of scholarly communication, supported by the modern electronic tools, so as to guarantee a satisfactory response to this question. For a large part of the international physics community, in particular, the electronic preprint archives are a partial but important step in this direction. Some researchers, notably in the fields of string theory and condensed matter, argue that they do not read refereed journals any longer for research purposes, since everything they need to know is published in the respective e-print archive (Langer 2000).

Other such preprint servers have been put in place, but it is not yet evident that the same solution - which some qualify as being "subversive" (Harnad 1997) - will work in all scholarly disciplines. Even among physicists, many believe refereeing is a good thing because manuscripts are improved and bad papers are filtered out. Yet the archives have introduced a healthy degree of flexibility and openness that certainly has been lacking in the environment of established journals.

What will further happen to the organization of scientific material as we continue to migrate to the internet? According to Pullinger (1998) the "journal" in the future will be the following, all at once:

• an information store of scientific data,
• an articulated editorial policy,
• a means of accessing information,
• a long-term archive so that scientists of the future will still have access to this information,

and this type of journal will live on because it is at the core of the conduct of science; it gives content to preprint servers, data bases, and more traditional products, depending on what the scientists want. The various goals of scientific publishing, namely: communication of the latest research, an archive of information and data, a record of scientific endeavour, claiming precedence in discovery, and career development, could all be improved, Pullinger argues, if they were not part of a journal. One thing electronic publishing has already begun to do is to unbundle these items. But how far will it go?

Scientists (especially in the exact and natural sciences) do not publish journal articles to communicate with disciplinary colleagues; personal communication, e-mail, e-prints, telephone, fax and meetings are much more important for this purpose. Also, they do not regularly read journal issues, which offer a miscellanea of papers of little direct interest to any single reader. Nevertheless, scholarly literature is a specific kind of cultural good that must be organized and stored for future purposes. It may be that eventually, some fraction of the presently little used material will prove of substantial import - just as has repeatedly happened in the past (Abel 1999).

Meanwhile, as noted earlier, librarians still face a seemingly relentless growth in the number of new and increasingly specialized journals. They are charged exorbitant rates on the grounds that they are read by many people (Chapman and Webster 1993). It is libraries, pressed by their academic colleagues, which provide the bulk of the circulation for journals and assured profit for the publisher.

Recommendations from academic staff, evidence from user studies, bibliometric analyses, subscription costs, are of course among the important factors in assessing the value of scholarly and scientific journals (Anderson 1997); but all these are not sufficient in themselves. A revision of academic organization and evaluation practices and research policies should contribute to devise more rational scholarly communications systems and orient their future development. These are important questions which require strategic consideration and a long-term approach.

As observed in the Introduction, in addition to supplementing existing "real world" activities the new technologies can actually stimulate more of them. Just as internet versions of virtual museums tend to generate more visitors to actual museums, it turns out that the on-line publication of academic articles leads to an increase in subscriptions (Woolgar 2000) and in the number of journal titles. At the same time, the new electronic technologies promise to make organisation more real in that they afford, in principle, the means of tracking and recording interactions and patterns of communications and relationships. However, this does not seem to be happening yet: whilst new electronic information providers are extending their information coverage, librarians face a confusing and bewildering scene of electronic subscriptions offers and packages, and scholars need to spend time on the web to research vast amounts of data and information on-line, offered in a large variety of formats and services. It seems that the electronic technologies have progressed at a much greater pace than the information sciences applied to publishing and communication.

We recall that from early studies of cross-citing amongst journals in different disciplines (Narin et al. 1972), a series of models of the interrelationship of these journals was developed; the separate disciplines appeared to relate to each other in an orderly manner, as had been noted earlier by de Solla Price (1969) and Brooks (1971), who referred to the "full interwoven fabric of science". Within disciplines, the journals were seen to form fully transitive hierarchies with very few relational conflicts. It was further observed (Carpenter and Narin 1973), again using cross-citing, that the journals can be grouped into clusters that are easily identified as sub-disciplinary subject areas. To the extent that they reflect the mosaic of (accepted) scientific knowledge, such citation analyses can be useful tools for the structuring of literature, provided they are used along with other scales to obtain useful or meaningful results (Garfield 1977).

Modern technologies considerably facilitate carrying out more comprehensive informetric analyses, in addition to allowing the development of new powerful tools and methods to organize and relate scientific information and documentation. Hyperlinks are already common within the internet culture, and the packaging of articles within journals may decline in importance in the near future (Brown 1998); the digital world and the internet offer new functionality and packaging possibilities, which hopefully will be used to build a more rational and organized publications system in science.

Again the example set by physics is worth mentioning here: the merger of the refereed APS journals with the e-print archive is expected to produce a powerful and cost-effective system with the help of the modern informatics tools. So good for physics as published in the APS journals; but, as noted before, the various scientific disciplines constitute a full interwoven fabric of science, which is continuously evolving, and it is therefore necessary to build flexible horizontal bridges that connect the large and increasing body of scientific literature in an orderly way. And this means linking intelligently not just among the literature produced today, but also with the literature of the past - including that which is not on the web or which is not published any more - because at this early stage there are already a number of electronic-only journal titles that have ceased to exist (Chartron 1999).

5. Worldwide opportunities for publication

Bill Gates, chief executive officer of by far the largest software manufacturer in the world, predicted in 1995 that "the information highway is going to break down barriers and may promote a world culture, or at least a sharing of cultural activities and values" (Gates 1995). More recently, Teledesic Corp., created by Gates and McCaw in 1990, announced: "On Day One of service - scheduled for 2004 - Teledesic will enable broad band connectivity for businesses, schools and individuals everywhere on the planet. It will accelerate the spread of knowledge throughout the world and facilitate improvements in education, health care and other crucial global issues" (Teledesic 2000). What is the "world culture" to be promoted? Whose knowledge will be spread? Who decides the 'crucial global issues'? The experience with the translation of the Encarta Encyclopaedia for different "markets" forced Bill Gates to admit that "reality can be subjective", that language is not the only relevant parameter because countries and cultures have different interests and interpretations.

In fact, information and communication, and the technologies used, are by their very nature cultural. As noted by Keniston (1998), "the content of software is determined not only by the language, but by deep, underlying, usually implicit and unacknowledged (because thought to be 'natural') assumptions inherent in the software itself. Software carries with it a view of the world, of people, of reality, of time, of the capabilities of users, which may or may not be compatible with any given and social context."

As is well known, the internet is overwhelmingly American-based, English- speaking, and Western-focused. In January 2000, roughly 73 % of the estimated 72.4 million host computers were in the US, 80 % in English-speaking nations and more than 90 % of the internet operated out of Western countries (ISC 2000). As to the on-line language populations, in December 2000 English dominated with 47.6 %, followed by Japanese with 9.6 % and Chinese with 7.6 % (GIS 2000). These distributions are very different from the distribution of languages around the world, which population-wise is dominated by Chinese in the first place, followed by English and further by Spanish in the third place with 6%. Of course, the distribution of languages in science is again very different, English being by far the dominating one. As an illustration of recent trends in the use of languages in science, Table II shows the breakout by language of papers published in the physical sciences.

The uneven use of local languages in science is of course not exclusive of the internet, but is being accentuated by it. More generally, the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity that is occurring among social systems, is exacerbated by technical systems. Among colleagues and peers there has been a gradual acceptance of the use of English as lingua franca and at least for the foreseeable future there is little reason to expect any change in this trend, as illustrated in Table II.

TABLE II. Percentage distribution of document languages, taken from Physics Abstracts.
Data for 1990-1 and 1995-6 (Cetto 1997), for 2000 (Physics Abstracts Online 2000).
The INSPEC database contains an average of 173,000 documents
for the biennium 1990-91, 178,500 for 1995-96, and 225,300 for the year 2000.

However, in addition to international communication among peers, there is communication with students, teachers, professionals, technicians, and with the broader public, which ideally should involve the local languages as they are best suited for a full comprehension. As noted by Einstein (1941), "The mental development of the individual and his way of forming concepts depend to a high degree upon language. This makes us realize to what extent the same language means the same mentality". Further, to be relevant a contribution to the growing body of doctrinal knowledge must be woven into the fabric of existing knowledge, and the writer must use the language conventions of his or her audience (Foucault 1972).

Precisely because countries and cultures have different interests and interpretations, as well as different needs and resources, the internet can become a helpful tool globally only to the extent that it is used worldwide for the dissemination of (locally produced) information. But the alleged 'worldwide' opportunities for publication in science are only very gradually being exploited here and there. There are no surprises: communities having a limited capacity to publish printed journals (besides having a limited access to information), can hardly show a strong capacity to publish electronically.

It is not necessary to recall that a small group of countries comprising 20 % of humanity account for over 90 % of the internationally recognized scientific production (see Table III). These countries are also the more technologically advanced and are therefore at great advantage when it comes to publishing and distributing the results of their scientific production. Scientists who are not connected to the net are excluded automatically from publishing in a growing number of journals. Further, the new ICT (information and communication technologies) products and applications are frequently designed in ignorance of developing countries' realities and fail to address the needs of the most disadvantaged sections of the community (UN 1998). As pointed out by Arunachalam (2000), the gulf in the levels of science and technology between the developed and the developing countries will tend to widen further with the rapid expansion of the internet in the West and the speedy transition to electronic publishing, and this can lead to increased brain drain and dependence on foreign aid of a different kind (knowledge imperialism).

 

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