Re-engineering scholarly communication: Thoughts addressed to authors

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 193-196

  Bennett, Scott ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2642663067     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp-027-04-185     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979), 30
2. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York 1957), 741 and 728
3. Peter J. Denning and Bernard Rous, 'The ACM Electronic Publishing Plan,' Communications of the ACM 38, 4 (1995): 100
4. 'Will Science Publishing Perish?' 1995 flyer issued by the Publications Marketing Division of the American Chemical Society, 2-3
5. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, Bruce A. Lehman, chair. US Department of Commerce, September 1995, 10-11
6. See, most recently, Kenneth Frazier, 'Protecting Copyright - and Preserving Fair Use - in the Electronic Future,' Chronicle of Higher Education (30 June 1995): A40
7. 'ACM Interim Copyright Policies and Author's Guide to ACM Interim Copyright Policy,' Communications of the ACM, 38, 4 (1995): 104-9
8. Samuel Clemens to Edward Everett Hale, 28 March 1905, in Mark Twain-Howells Letters, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, Mass. 1960), 2: 796
9. Jerry D. Campbell, 'Copyright, Public Policy, and Digital Libraries: Searching for First Principles,' in Copyright, Public Policy, and the Scholarly Community (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1995), 5
10. US Constitution, Article 1, section 8, clause 8, and Intellectual Property and the NII, 19-23. See also L. Ray Patterson and Stanley W. Lindberg, The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights (Athens, Ga. 1991).
11. See Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. An Internet Discussion about Scientific and Scholarly Journals and Their Future, edited by Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O'Donnell (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1995), 11.
12. See further: 'Paper means substantial expense. Substantial expense means copyright protection. Copyright protection means fees. Fees mean "protection" of scholars' work from nonpaying eyeballs. THAT is precisely what the scholar does NOT want. Hence the conflict of interest in the Faustian alliance.' Harnad to Lloyd S. Etheredge, 4 July 1994, Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads, 33.
13. Other commentaries on the dysfunctional management of copyright include Scott Bennett and Nina Matheson, 'Scholarly Articles: Valuable Commodities for Universities,' Chronicle of Higher Education (27 May 1992): B1-B3;
14. and 'Cooperative Information Resources Development: A Constituency Based Policy Analysis. Final Report to the Council on Library Resources . . . January 1994,' Triangle Research Libraries Network of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
15. For instance, Lorrin R. Garson, speaking at a September 1995 conference on behalf of the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society, reported that the ACS has increased the number of pages published in its journals an average of 13.4 per cent annually over the previous five years. Other factors contribute to high rates of cost increase, including the long-term devaluation of the US dollar against foreign currencies, the exploitation of quasi-monopoly positions by some publishers, and - more recently - significant increases in paper and postage costs.
16. Faxon Company estimate of 16 June 1995
17. 'Information Issues: An Occasional Publication of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries' (Fall 1995): 1
18. For example, Knobots and the GroupLense capability developed at MIT.
19. Douglas E. Van Howeling and Michael J. McGill, The Evolving National Information Network: Background and Challenges,' a report of the Commission on Preservation and Access, Washington, DC, July 1993, 24
20. Donald J. Waters argues for re-establishing the vital link between the archiving of scholarship and economic rationing as follows: 'A focused archival solution [to problems of high cost in scholarly communication] might aim . . . to capture the real intellectual activity [of scholarship] from the on-line places wherever it is now naturally occurring and to ensure that such activity is housed in certified, durable and readily accessible archives. Where there is redundancy between print and electronic form, as there increasingly is in disciplines such as mathematics and physics where pre-print markets flourish, might not such a solution save scholars, publishers, libraries and universities the trouble and expense of writing, publishing, collecting and financing in conventional print forms merely to establish an archival record? Given a digital archive system on which they can depend and which provides real, tangible economic benefits, scholars might not only be moved to change the way that they conduct scholarship but also the mechanisms, such as tenure review, by which they measure the quality of that work. If all these hypotheses are plausible then do we not also need to say bluntly that our own unwillingness or inability as archival institutions to provide a trustworthy archival record of substantially changed and changing intellectual activity is itself a critical barrier to the rehabilitation and renewal of a viable (read: affordable) system of scholarly communication?' See 'Realizing Benefits from Inter-Institutional Agreements: The Implications of the Draft Report of the Task Force on Digital Archiving,' presentation to the 19 October 1995 meeting of the Association of Research Libraries and published as an insert in the Commission on Preservation Newsletter, no. 85, January 1996.
21. The impasse about prices feeds upon itself, as is evident in the appearance of cancellations and the revenue loss they represent as an explicit factor in the pricing strategies of journal publishers. In the Faxon Company price update of 16 June 1995, cancellations contributed 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent to the increases projected for North American and European journals, respectively.
22. 'Publishers and the Net,' Chronicle of Higher Education (23 June 1995): A17-18.
23. There are fewer exemplars among university presses in part because they have little presence in journal publishing. The exceptions are therefore all the more worth noting. They include the new e-joumal Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science published by the MIT Press and Project Muse at the Johns Hopkins University Press. Project Muse aims at creating electronic versions for the entire list of Hopkins Press journals.
24. See the ACS flyer, 'Will Science Publishing Perish?' for a defence of current practices, in which 'no part of the process is superfluous' (4). ACS observes (6) that journals are in fact more expensive to publish electronically than in print.
25. Denning and Rous, 'The ACM Electronic Publishing Plan,' 100-2
26. Their number is most comprehensively represented in the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 4th ed., edited by Ann Okerson (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1994).
27. Ginsparg message to Lloyd S. Etheredge, 5 July 1994, in Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads, 37
28. The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge,' Leonardo 27 (1994): 162-3