The wave of the present: The printed scholarly journal on the edge of the internet

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 145-150

  Tomlins, Christopher L ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002027043     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp-029-03-133     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. See generally, Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1991): 53-300.
2. On the historical profession, see John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989): 6-25;
3. and Peter Novick, Thai Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1988): 47-60.
4. Quoted in Novick, 52.1 am indebted to Michael Grossberg's own discussion of these issues, in 'History Journals in the Twenty-First Century,'AHA Perspectives (May/June 1997), for guiding me to Jameson's statement and more generally for its own assessment of the current scene.
5. See, for example, Andrew Odlyzko, 'On the Road to Electronic Publishing' (revised version, 30 April 1995), Euromath Bulletin 2,1 (June 1996) at hup:// www.math.ethz.ch/~shared/emb [issue still in preparation, not yet published].
6. April 1995 draft printed in History Journals and the Electronic Future: Conference Reader (Bloomington: AHA-OAH 1997).
7. Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, 'Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,'Journal of American History 84, 1 (June 1997): 136.
8. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet,' Chronicle of Higher Education (1 November 1996): A56.
9. Bernard Hibbitts, 'Last Writes? Reassessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace,' New York University Law Review 71 (June 1996): 615-88; also available (version 1.1) at http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/lastrev.htm. Professor Hibbitts was a co-panellist in the ASLH meeting session where this paper was originally delivered.
10. Donald Black, The Epistemology of Pure Sociology,' Law & Social Inquiry 20, 3 (Summer 1995): 829-70
11. See, for example, Andrew Odlyzko, Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals,' International Journal of HumanComputer Studies 42 (1995): 71-122;
12. Odlyzko, 'On the Road to Electronic Publishing'; Stevan Harnad, 'Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?' Serials Review 21, 1 (1995);
13. Stevan Hamad, 'Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals,' in R. Peek and G. Newby, eds., Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): 103-18.
14. For a useful summary, see Rob Kling and Lisa Covi, 'Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication,' The In/ormation Society 11,4 (November 1995): 261-71; also at hup:// www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/epc/chwp/kling/, sect. 1-6
15. I can offer a concrete personal illustration. Some years ago, I spent a considerable period of time conducting research in the Social Law Library in Boston, which is located on the twelfth floor of the Suffolk County Court House in Pemberton Square. The Social Law Library was created in the early nineteenth century by practitioner subscription and is one of the oldest practitioner law libraries in the country. As anyone who has worked there recently will know, it is also under enormous and constant pressure to provide access to the most recent information. As a result, all the trial attorneys used the main reading room, which by the end of the 1980s had become a sort of snake-pit of computer cables, terminals everywhere, books increasingly redundant except as dignified decoration. I roamed the mezzanine and the upper levels, deteriorating accommodation for what were called 'the old editions.' There was no dignity to these books - they were basically discards, crammed backwards into unused space, dingy stacks often without illumination. There 1 found treasure upon treasure. It was in those old open stacks, for example, under a pile of discarded casebooks, that I found a nineteenth-century attorney's personal manuscript notes on a series of tort cases in which I was interested. My point is that the premium on speed and recency that the library was forced to respect to do its primary job of servicing trial attorneys led it to be indifferent to the older material that was part of its collection. But because speed and recency were not relevant to what I did, we coexisted quite happily. Indeed, my access was actually facilitated by the library's helpless indifference (at that time) to the importance, in my terms, of what they possessed.
16. Kling and Covi, 'Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media,' sect. 3;
17. Sandra Woolfrey, 'The Economics of Journal Publishing and the Rhetoric for Moving to an Electronic Format,' ACLS Background Materials, CAO Meeting, Kansas City (November 1995): 2, i-vii. It is interesting to note that Stevan Hamad's 'subversive' antitrade revenue model of financing scholarly publication (subsidy by university presses and scholarly societies) reproduces what has long been traditional practice in the humanities, a model alas now beset by precisely those pressures that he thinks it can subvert.
18. See Hamad, 'Implementing Peer Review on the Net,'107, 116.
19. Hibbitts, 'Last Writes,' 641-2
20. See Fytton Rowland, The Need for Information Organizations and Information Professionals in the Internet Era';
21. Robert H. Marks, The Economic Challenges of Publishing Electronic Journals';
22. and Janet H. Fisher, The True Costs of an Electronic Journal';
23. all in Ellen F. Duranceau, The Economics of Electronic Publishing,' Serials Review 21, 1 (1995): 84-90..
24. Hibbitts,'Last Writes'675
25. Hamad, 'Implementing Peer Review on the Net,' 109-13
26. Kling and Covi, 'Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media,' sect. 4;
27. Jacques Leslie, 'Pixelating Peer Review Is Revolutionizing Scholarly journals,' Wired 2, 10 (October 1994) at http://www.wired.eom/wired/2.10/departments/electrosphere/ ejournals.html
28. This appears to be the experience, thus far, of the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, published by MIT Press, according to press representatives.
29. OhioLINK Update 3,2 (September 1997) at http://www.ohiolink.edu/about/ updateJ. Purchase in electronic form of massive aggregations of journal titles like this will become increasingly common. A common emerging pattern is for publishers or aggregators to bundle titles and offer them to libraries on a domain licensing basis. Hard-copy subscriptions are maintained at a discounted additional cost, or are supplied free. The bundle may well include many titles that the purchaser might not previously have subscribed to, and probably would not want if offered on a stand-alone basis. The publisher licenses the purchaser to make the titles available across a defined domain within which all users have broad access rights. For the purchasing library, a crucial contractual question is whether it is buying actual copy or simply renting an efficient electronic distribution service. Are electronic use and access rights meaningful equivalents to the rights conveyed by hard-copy purchases? Who maintains the electronic archive publisher, library, or third party? What guarantees accrue to those who have bought subscriptions but later discontinue them? What do they have in their (electronic) stacks? If nothing - that is, if they have been renting - then the bundle is unlikely to be considered an adequate substitute for hard-copy subscriptions. If buying, then the impact will likely be much more profound in the long run, and will certainly discourage continuation of multiple individual subscriptions across members of a consortium. Even then, however, the whole issue of what rights the library has in the archive may still be sufficiently ambiguous to prevent the library from dumping its individual hard-copy subscriptions in the short run. The tendency of libraries to negotiate bulk purchases through consortia adds another layer of imponderability, in that stability of access to what one has bought depends on the stability of the consortium and the terms of one's participation in it.
30. Along with the British publisher Pergamon, Elsevier Science is the publisher most often cited as promoter of the massive increases in science serial prices that helped create the serials budget crisis with which we have all become familiar over the last twenty years. This is relevant because it seems reasonable to expect that bulk electronic information purchases will not only create extensive technical dependencies between purchasers and suppliers, but also render the purchaser effectively captive to the relationship by dint of its sheer scale. Serials budgets may thus become even more hostage to a few bulk suppliers and their pricing policies, rendering unaffiliated titles or small publisher titles (like most humanities journals) highly vulnerable to cancellation.
31. It is worth noting that Reed ElsevierAVolters Kluwer also owns Lexis-Nexis and is thus happily positioned to supply information to purchasers either by domainsubscription or on demand by fragment.
32. 'History Journals and the Electronic Future,'AHA/OAH Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, 3-8 August 1997. For details of this conference and its final report, see http://www.indiana.edu/-amhrev/history.htm. This essay is inspired in large part by that conference, and has benefited enormously from the materials circulated by the organizers.
33. As a technical device, hypertext is the Goodyear Blimp to the footnote's bicycle. That is, it makes extraordinary depth and breadth of linkage and cross-reference in a field of vision possible. Considered as a mode of discourse, however, hypertext at present seems to me to do no more than reproduce the quality of layered meaning that all good writing should have - and, disturbingly, does so without the artistry. Do I really want my cleverest allusions printed in blue and underlined so that no one will miss them?
34. Peter B. Boyce, 'Perpetual Access,' on liblicense-i@lists.yale.edu (3 September 1997).
35. Ibid. Boyce acknowledges that since the total base of knowledge is distributed over many providers, the problem arises of how to ensure that the complete archive of the interlinked literature remains accessible at every point in its use. Even in his discipline, which he describes as 'a compact community with only a few major journals' worldwide, the task is formidable. For the humanities, it would be more complex yet. Here the experience of the Slavic Review, described by its editor Diane Koenker, is probably more typical. She reports: 'Six back issues of the Slavic Review are currently on-fine, a result of an initiative at (he University of Pennsylvania. These issues are available on the world wide web, for free; they appear with the standard copyright information explaining 'fair use." The on-line issues were scanned and converted to ASCII text and coded in HTML they do not "look" like the printed Slavic Review pages, but they are searchable. The on-line Slavic Review was cited in a recent ACLS document about the 'future of electronic publishing." But the on-line review illustrâtes many of the problems inherent in the medium. [First, Archiving]: When (he editorial office of the journal moved from Penn to Illinois, Penn relinquished all in(eres( in maintaining, let alone updating, the data base. Currently the issues "reside" on a server at Illinois. Were the electronic publication to continue in this low-tech way, there would be a new storage problem the next time the journal changes hands. Our method of operation, in other words, discourages durability of the electronic product. (Second, Technology]: the current format is not state-ofthe-art. (Third, Costs]: the current editorial staff does not have the resources to continue preparing !'ie on-line version, thus (he six on-line issues dangle out there in cyber-space, creating a public relations problem:/aise hopes of further electronic issues.' Diane P. Koenker, 'Report on Conference of History Editors on Electronic Publishing in the Future,' prepared for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), 25 August 1997, slavrev@ragnar.econ.uiuc.edu.
36. The Valley of the Shadow is a hypermedia WWW site created by Edward Ayers (Professor of History, University of Virginia), which archives, organizes, and displays a mass of information (newspapers, census tracts, church and military records, private letters and diaries, maps and images) about two communities that ended up on opposite sides of the American Civil War: Augusta County, Virginia (Confederate) and Franklin County, Pennsylvania (Union). The archive is divided into 'Eve of War' and 'War Years' segments, and will also cover Emancipation and Reconstruction. The project began as a research archive specific to Professor Ayers' scholarly work on the coming of the Civil War, but has developed into 'a living archive' of wide application for teachers, scholars, students, and the general public, a resource 'that encompasses the largest problems in American history, presenting not answers for easy consumption but rather open avenues for investigation.'
37. See The Story Behind the Valley Project,' at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2J.
38. See also Taking Aim at the "Ken Bums" View of the Civil War,' Chronicle of Higher Education 44,28 (20 March 1998): A16-A17.
39. Boyce, 'Perpetual Access.'
40. See also M. Ethan Katsh, 'Law Reviews and the Migration to Cyberspace,' Akron Law Review 29, 2 (Winter 1996): 115-21.
41. On this point, see also Howard A. Denemark, The Death of Law Reviews Has Been Predicted: What Might Be Lost When the Last Law Review Shuts Down?' Selon Hall Law Review 27, 1 (1996): 17-20