Research Articles in Scholarly Electronic Communication

Transcription

1 Research Articles in Scholarly Electronic Communication Rob Kling & Ewa Callahan Center for Social Informatics SLIS Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, IN For: Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), (volume 37) Blaise Cronin and Debora Shaw (Eds.) 01/17/2002 (Draft 4.08d) I. Introduction We are currently in a period of substantial debate about the character of scholarly publishing systems. Some of the issues -- such as the costs of journals, speed of publication, and fairness of blindly refereed reviewing practices -- predate public access to the Internet. There has been an economic crisis in scholarly publishing since the late 1980 s due to the costs of scientific journals rising much faster than both inflation and the growth of library budgets ((Miller, 2000; Kirkpatrick, 2000). During the 1990s, some academic research libraries have reduced the number of their journals subscriptions across many disciplines -- by thousands of journals. Many analysts believe that the costs of electronic publishing would be substantially lower than the costs of publishing paper journals. Further, some have argued that electronic publishing would enable not-for-profit organizations, such as universities, to assume the responsibilities of publishing a substantial fraction of the corpus of scholarly journals at relatively lower costs than "for profit" (trade) publishers. There have also been concerns about the integrity of article review processes in traditional scholarly publishing. Some analysts hope that new electronic journals (ejournals) would enable review processes to be fairer or clearer. In addition, some analysts see electronic publishing as offering opportunities for more rapid communication, broader access to scholarly literature, new documentary forms (hypertext), and richer modes of scholarly communication (e.g., the addition of extensive appendices of data, executable algorithms, photographs, audio/video clips). These debates are fueled by a combination of problems with some aspects of the existing publication regimes and the beliefs (by some) that various forms of electronic communication may significantly resolve these problems. Many working scholars in a wide variety of fields, as well as some librarians and others concerned with scholarly publishing, have articulated potential solutions to these problems (and others) in which electronic publishing (and easy access to the Internet and

2 the WWW) is now a central element. It is worth keeping in mind that less than 10 years ago, leading experiments with e-journals used other media (such as CDs) and interfaces (e.g., X-Windows for Unix) that were much less common than today's Web browsers. To address these issues, the scholarly communities have undertaken numerous and varied efforts to use the Internet to improve communication of research articles through the use of online repositories of research articles and e-journals in a variety of formats. In this chapter we focus on the role of the Internet in supporting the communication of research articles. Scholarly communication can take place via a number of documentary genres (as well as conversational genres) including. letters, memos, conference papers technical reports, dissertations, primary articles, review essays, monographs, and edited books. However, the primary scholarly literature is composed of articles (usually published journals or disseminated at conferences) and books. The vast majority of practical projects to use the Internet in enhancing the communication of this primary literature have focused on articles. In addition, most of the research about scholar's behavior with electronic media has also emphasized articles. Consequently, we will also emphasize the role of the Internet in supporting documentary communication via articles. While this topic may appear rather banal, it has been the subject of substantial controversy among scholars, librarians, publishers, and research sponsors. At the extremes, some analysts have argued that scholars should "free the literature" for broad access by publishing their articles on their own web sites and make them free to readers (Harnad *01995), while others have argued for electronic extensions of publisher-controlled versions of peer-reviewed journals that are sold by subscription to readers. Between these extreme positions have been many proposals and a few studies of these new electronic formats. Peer-review seems to be one pivotal criterion that many scientists employ in evaluating the legitimacy of publication venues (Kling and Covi, 1995; Weller, 2001). We have divided this chapter into a section that carefully examines the character of (perreviewed) scholarly e-journals and a section that examine the electronic distribution of articles that have not been peer reviewed, such as self-published manuscripts, or articles in working paper series and technical report series. We will discuss the opportunities and challenges of these publication strategies and examine how they are shaped by sociotechnical relationships. In this chapter we will emphasize the contributions of the social and sociotechnical research literatures. However, other types of publications will be included as well because they provide important context for the research questions and research studies. Space limitations have limited our ability to examine some important issues such as the economics of publishing and the legal issues of electronic publishing, such as intellectual property. Most of the reviewed studies concentrate on North- American approaches. We identified literature for this chapter by starting with the studies on scholarly electronic publishing that we knew from our earlier research. We also conducted searches in online bibliographies such as the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography compiled by Bailey ( Collection Management and Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resource by C.J. Amstrong ( Electronic Journals: A Selected Guide posted on-line by

3 Harrassowitz. We also examined the bibliographies of monographs such as Toward Electronic Journals by Tenopir and King (2000), Communicating Research by Meadows, and the bibliographic essay by Chad Buckley et al (1999). Other sources were brought to our attention by our colleagues and reviewers of this chapter. Several previous ARIST chapters discussed different aspects of scholarly electronic communication. Peek and Pomerantz (1998) presented an excellent review of history of e-journals, and examined and compared various models, scenarios, experiments and projects. They also discussed acceptance of e-journals in scholarly community. However, they focused primarily upon the nature of specific publishing formats and venues. In contrast, we will emphasize what we can learn from systematic empirical research about the behavior of people with the distribution of research articles by electronic means, especially via Internet forums. King and Tenopir (1999) reviewed studies of scholars' use and perception of e- journals. Dalton (1995) examined early discussions of peer review in electronic publishing. In the most recent ARIST chapter on this topic, Borgman and Furner (2001) examined citing and linking practices in electronic publications. Social Informatics of digital libraries was the subject of a chapter by Bishop and Star (1996). Our chapter will concentrate on social aspects of electronic publications, thus some of the issues discussed in previous chapters will be included in context. Before we examine the behavior of readers, authors and others with electronic publication, we want to clarify some key conceptual issues, including the authors and audiences for key literatures about these topics, the relationships between publishing and communication, and some key concepts, including electronic journals and preprints. II. Literatures about Scholarly Electronic Communication Scholarly Electronic Communication (SEC) refers to the distribution of scholarly articles, papers, and messages by electronic means as opposed to their distribution by paper media. The literature on the subject SEC is vast, and ranges from research studies to popular writing. In existing bibliographies, research papers, professional articles and popular works are indiscriminately mixed. Further, only a small fraction of the articles report research. In the most comprehensive SEC bibliography, compiled by Charles W. Bailey, only 58 articles of over 1200 appear to be research articles. The existing literature presents often different and contradictory views on both the current state and the likely future of electronic scholarly publishing. Such discrepancies point to the need for systematic research on electronic scholarly communication. There are distinctive literatures about the subject of Scholarly Electronic Communication: Social and socio-technical research literature, which includes journals such as JASIS&T, research monographs (e.g., Tenopir & King, 2000), and specialized research conferences. Technological research literature, which includes analytical examinations of technological standards and design strategies. It is co-extensive with the technological research literature about digital libraries.

4 Developer literature, which provides technical details of the structure of various electronic forums. Practitioner literature (professional writing), whose primary audiences include publishers, librarians, academic administrators, and faculty who may publish in e- media, organize electronic collections, or evaluate such electronic publications. It includes an Enthusiast literature, that advocates and/or predicts an inevitable switch to electronic publishing as the most efficient means of scholarly communication. (85%?) It also includes a Literature of possibilities, that is less partisan than the enthusiast literature, and which acknowledges both the advantages and difficulties associated with electronic publishing. Popular accounts of Scholarly Electronic Communication Forums written for the public (in newspapers). Marketing descriptions of Scholarly Electronic Communication Forums provided by their organizers to prospective authors. In this chapter, we will emphasize social and socio-technical research literature; but we will draw upon other accounts to help provide citations to specific projects and for contextual information. Scholars have many kinds of forums and media for communication about their research. They can participate in face-to-face seminars and meet at conferences. They can use paper mail to send articles to their colleagues. They can publish their articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings. The mix of these forums varies from field to field. For example, conference proceedings are much more important in computer science than in information science. Journals tend to be more important as a medium for communicating original research than in the humanities. In some fields, such as economics, every major research institute seems to have a working paper series, while such series are rarely organized by research institutes that study humanities topics. The use of electronic media expands these traditional kinds of opportunities. Scholars can send or post their articles to scholarly listservs and mailing lists asking for comments and suggestions, post their articles in an online series of research articles, publish in (electronic) journals, or publish monographic works, some of which may appear in online collections and repositories. The academic community also produces many supporting materials such as conference announcements, websites, and bibliographies that facilitate scholarly communication, but that are not forums. The roles and opportunities presented by the various electronic forums are discussed often in the scholarly literatures, professional writing, specialized on-line forums, and in news stories for academics (as in the Chronicle of Higher Education). But there is little systematic empirically grounded research about the development and use of most of these communication forums. Only scholarly e-journals and collections research articles that have not yet been peer-reviewed have attracted substantial attention of empirically-oriented social and behavioral researchers. For this reason these two kinds of forums will be our major foci.

5 We will discuss e-journals before we discuss the publication and use of unrefereed articles because e-journals have been the subject of substantially more systematic research. However, we believe that the widespread availability of articles on special WWW sites prior to their acceptance by journals will probably do more to improve scholarly communication than will the development of numerous new e-journals. However, before we discuss research about these topics in detail, we must clarify a few basic concepts. III. Conceptualizing Publication, Research Articles, and Electronic Journals The literatures of SEC rest on some key terms that various authors use with subtle but important differences in their meanings. These terms include: publication (which can range from one-day posting on a web site to appearing in print in a large circulation prestigious scientific journal, in different accounts) preprint (which can range from any article that a scholar circulates for comment to an article that has been submitted to a journal, accepted for publication, and that has not yet been formally published, in different accounts). e-print, an electronic version of a manuscript, and used as an equivalent to an electronic preprint, in many accounts. Unfortunately, these differing conceptions of publication and preprints in all of the literatures that we listed in Section II seem to sow considerable confusions and ambiguity about the questions raised, issues addressed, claims made, and answers provided. Scholarly publishing and scholarly communication are terms that have not been a defined in standard way. They are often used interchangeably, as their meanings are similar, but there are also some distinguishing differences. Formal publication is often based on the assumption that an article will be read, but it is possible that it will not attract attention and that communication process will cease. Formal journal policies that usually prohibit submissions of articles that have been previously published, assume that an author s entire intended audience has read them. In practice, many scholarly articles are read by only a small fraction of their potential audiences and publishing may be primarily a one-way process. Publishing is a formal part of scholarly communication, and serves as a basis for scholarly evaluation. Scholars and programs are reviewed, in part, based on the quality and quantity of their research as measured by the acceptance of the research by prestigious journals and publishers, and journal impact factors, measured by citation analyses. Scholarly communication can be described informally as a two-way process characterized by its communicators and its content. Communicators can take on roles such as authors and readers or speakers and listeners. Content may vary from pure scholarly content (research, teaching) to supporting activities like conference organizing,

6 journal editing, etc., although the content must be related to academic activities. Authors, readers, editors, publishers, academic associates are all participants in the process. Often, when scholarly communication is discussed, the scholarly community is often mistakenly treated as a homogenous unit, without consideration of the differences in the practices among different fields. These differences are, however, readily visible in the traditional model of scholarly communication and are reported and emphasized in some of the research that we will review. Kling and McKim (1999) developed an analytical publishing framework which is based on the idea that publication is a multidimensional continuum. They observe that when a scholarly document is effectively published within a scholarly community, it seems to satisfy three criteria: publicity, trustworthiness, and accessibility. They described their three criteria as follows: Publicity the document has to be announced to scholars so that they may learn about its existence. Publicity can be represented by a continuum of activities like subscriptions, reports lists, abstract databases, and citation. Trustworthiness the document has been subject to a social process that assures readers that the content of the document satisfies the norms of quality accepted by the community. Trustworthiness is typically marked by peer review process, social status of the journal, and publishing house quality, but less formally may also be based on the author's reputation and institutional affiliation. Accessibility readers must able to access the document in a stable manner over time. Libraries, publishers and clearinghouses typically assure accessibility, by distributing and storing the documents. This framework analyzes the publishing process from a social perspective, and emphasizes its communicative role. Kling and McKim developed their framework to help answer questions about whether any article that is posted on an internet site should be considered to have been published. They analyzed different types of postings, such as articles that are posted on the author s personal web site and articles that are posted in the technical report series of well known academic departments, and show how they differ in their publicity, trustworthiness and accessibility near the time of posting as well as five years after their original posting. They also examine a number of paper publishing Practices. They show that from a behavioral perspective, publishing is a continuum rather than a binary (yes/no) and that the relationship between electronic publishing and paper publishing is relatively complex. We will use the Kling-McKim publishing framework throughout this chapter. Kling and McKim's articulation of publishing as a continuum influenced a recent proposal to define the ends of the continuum. In an International Working Group (*02000) was invited by the International Association of STM Publishers to clarify some of the confusions about nomenclature that is confounding the discussions of electronic publishing. This International Working Group proposed a distinction between the "first publication" of a work, and a (possibly subsequent) 'definitive publication." They write:

7 "The crucial fixed point, in our view, remains the final published version of an article after peer review (or any future equivalent). We have called this the Definitive publication and believe that it should be clearly identified as such. In the electronic environment, certain other characteristics are also required in addition to peer review: It must be publicly available. The relevant community must be made aware of its existence. A system for long-term access and retrieval must be in place (e.g. Handle). It must not be changed (technical protection and/or certification are desirable). It must not be removed (unless legally unavoidable). It must be unambiguously identified (e.g. by a SICI or DOI). It must have a bibliographic record (metadata) containing certain minimal information. Archiving and long-term preservation must be provided for. This is the version to which citations, secondary services and so forth should ideally point. However, we recognize (sic) that earlier versions of an author's work may be made available, and that in some disciplines these are already being cited by other authors. Such early versions might be all that is available to an author for citation at the time of submission of the author's work. However, versions which are not durably recorded in some form, or which do not have a mechanism for continuing location and access, or which are altered over time (without due provision for version control, as outlined below), should not be regarded as 'publications' in the sense that publication has been defined here, even if cited by an author." If an author refers to a definitive publication as 'a publication," what label(s) should be used to characterize a first publication? We will examine this nomenclature in the next section. Even in the paper world publishing was a continuum. The famous Garvey-Griffith (*01979) publishing model, based on careful empirical studies of research communications in the field of psychology, treats the appearance of an article in printed conference proceedings or in a journal as the only forms of communication that warrant the label "publication." Although they were not explicit, they used the term "publication" to refer to the International Working Group's conception of a definitive publication. In many fields, scholars circulate "first publications" -- informally to colleagues, or more formally as publications in a series of working papers, technical reports, occassional papers, or research memoranda.

8 While many scholars believe that the trajectory of publication described by Garvey and Griffith fits many fields, there are important variations in sequence and nomenclature across disciplines. For example, MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab started its series of research articles, called "AI Memos" in the late 1950s. Some of these AI Memos became conference papers and/or journal articles and/or book chapters. However, some AI Memos remained research manuscripts without subsequent publication in other forums. In the 1960s, the first research-oriented computer science departments often organized paper technical reports series of articles that might subsequently appear in printed conference proceedings and/or in journals. However, some of the manuscripts in this series, such as dissertations, were not expected to be published elsewhere in the form that they appear in the series. When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory was established in 1962, its first director, W. Panofsky, requested that the library staff collect unpublished research reports in high energy physics (Kreitz, *0199x; Till, *02001). In the field of economics, several academic departments developed working paper series in the 1970s. These collections were heterogeneous in their contents. Many of these articles would be subsequently published in printed conference proceedings, journals or book chapters. Those articles which were variously labeled (research) manuscripts, technical reports, working papers, were also at some stage arguably preprints if their subsequent publication did not entail substantial revisions. However, some would not be subsequently published in any other form, and consequently should not be called preprints at all. What would they be preprints of if they were not subsequently published? Further, if a research memo or technical report was substantially revised during editorial review, the original version should not be called a preprint either. In 1969 The American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sponsored a community-wide distribution of a weekly list of new research manuscripts received by the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC). This listing, was named "Preprints in Particles and Fields. (PPF)." Hundreds of physicists paid an annual subscription fee to receive PPF weekly by airmail. (Addis, *01994; Till *02001). (PPF continued hardcopy publication until the Fall 1993.) Not all of the manuscripts that are listed in PPF are subsequently published. This leaves open the question exactly what are these subsequently unpublished research manuscripts to be considered as preprints of? These differences in the nomenclature for research articles ie., preprints by high energy physicists and manuscripts, technical reports (or working papers) by others continues today. Unfortunately, some of this terminological diversity clouds the discussions of alternative ways to organize Internet forums to support scholarly communication. It is amplified by the terms used by some advocates of more open exchanges of research articles via Internet forums, such as Stevan Harnad (*01998), who often refers to "unrefereed preprints." In the Garvey-Griffith publishing model, preprints are distributed when an article has been submitted to a journal, and also has been accepted for publication. The preprint precedes a formally published printed version. Before an article is accepted for publication in a specific venue, it is not a preprint. It may be referred to as a manuscript, a research memorandum (or research memo), a working paper, a technical report, or an

9 occasional paper. We believe that this linguistic usage should be retained, even though the term preprint is often casually used to refer to articles in any of these categories. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a preprint as "something printed in advance; a portion of a work printed and issued before the publication of the whole." High-energy physicists gave their research manuscripts a status boost by referring to them as preprints before they were submitted for and accepted for publication. For example, according to its official description, "Recently, fewer than 40% of submitted papers have been finally accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters (PRL)." It should not surprise us if many of the research manuscripts that are listed on PPF and that were originally submitted to PRL were not accepted for publication in PRL. Perhaps many of these manuscripts rejected by PRL would be accepted elsewhere, but few of the manuscripts listed on PPF are actually guaranteed to be preprints of any specific publication when they are first listed. Unfortunately, physicists have casually used the term preprint to refer to research manuscripts whose publication status is similar to articles that are called research manuscripts, working papers and technical reports in other fields. For example, the PREPRINT Network at Oak Ridge National Laboratories defines "preprints, or 'e-prints,' are manuscripts that have not yet been published, but may have been reviewed and accepted; submitted for publication; or intended for publication and being circulated for comment." The Preprint network is a valuable service in the physical sciences; but its definition of preprint is so elastic that it can refer to any memo (or manuscript), even one that is only posted on an author's personal web site, and not subsequently published anywhere else. In this chapter, we will try to use terminology to describe research documents that can work across many disciplines. We believe that the term preprint should be used in a strict sense to refer to articles that have been accepted for a specific venue. Manuscript is the primary candidate for labeling articles that authors circulate prior to their acceptance for publication. The term manuscript is still widely used by journal editors to refer to articles that are to be submitted and/or are under review. It is strangely anachronistic, since between the 16th and mid-20th centuries, it referred to documents that were handwritten and "not printed" (*0199x OED). In the 20th century, the "manuscript" handscript) was replaced by the term typescript to refer to typed documents. In today's parlance, the term for electronic documents might by electro-scripts or e-scripts, although we have not found that usage in the context of scholarly communication. The term e- print, which some scientists use to refer to electronic manuscripts plays off of its resonance with preprints, and we believe that e-reprints should refer to electronic versions of pre-prints. We will use the term manuscript or e-script to refer to articles that have not yet been accepted for publication in a specific venue. We will use the terms preprint and e- print conservatively -- to refer to manuscripts in the form in which they are likely to appear in a conference proceedings, journal or book (whether in printed form, electronic form, or both). We will use the terms manuscript and e-script to refer to articles that have been published in an institutionally sponsored venue, such as a working paper series or an online server for research articles, such as arxiv.org. We view Harnad's discussion "unrefereed preprints" as generally misleading; if he changed his nomenclature to "unrefereed research reports,""unrefereed technical reports,"

10 or "unrefereed research manuscripts," and similar terms, his enthusiastic arguments for enabling scholars share these documents to would be much more lucid. Even the common term "article" can implicitly refer to a publication venue. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an article as "a literary composition forming materially part of a journal, magazine, encyclopedia, or other collection, but treating a specific topic distinctly and independently." We will use the term article in a broader way to refer to any document that fits the OED s definition, or that is in a form that could fit the OED s definition if it were published. We are using the term manuscript to refer to a version of an article that is in a form that has not (yet) been accepted for publication in a specific venue. Electronic versions may be called e-scripts. Preprint refers to a relationship between two documents, rather than a feature of a document in isolation. Consider the unusual case in which a scholar writes and article, submits it to a journal, and has it both accepted for publication and finally published with no changes (including copyediting and updating references). A copy of the article in the scholar's file starts out as a research memorandum (or working paper or technical report) on the day that she submits it to the journal for publication. When it is accepted for publication, with no changes, it's status changed to that of a preprint (ie., a preprint of a forthcoming definitive publication). That is, it spawned a copy of itself that would appear as a definitive publication in the journal. When the journal issue that included the article was published, it became a reprint of that definitive publication. It is more common for the authors of articles submitted to journals to be asked to make some changes by peer reviewers, or to initiate some changes on their own. In the social sciences, where many of the most prestigious journals accept less than 20% of the articles that are submitted for review, many authors will submit their rejected articles to other journals. This practice is not uncommon in the natural sciences as well. Of course, some articles are never accepted for publication. These articles do not merit the label preprint in any stage before their is a clear relationship to the article that will be accepted for definitive publication in a conference proceedings, journal or book. As an article travels through a peer review process, value is added to it by a combination of the editorial work that can lead to major or minor changes, as well as by the "peer-reviewed" status that is bestowed upon it by the conference or journal. The International Working Group was carefully avoiding calling preprints, as used by high energy physicists, a "definitive publication." In short, many of today's "preprint networks" and "preprint servers" should be called "memo networks," "memo servers." These services may include some preprints and even definitive publications in their corpuses. However, their defining characteristic is to make available research manuscripts rapidly and usually inexpensively to readers. Unfortunately, most discussions of e-journals conflate a number of different formats into one overarching, and sometimes misleading, category --electronic journals (e-journals). For example, Okerson (*02000) reviews the history of journals and discusses a few electronic journals of the early 1990s. She also provides a timeline from 1991 to 1999 and indicates the number of electronic journal titles that are listed in two directories. The number of titles grew from 27 in 1991, through 3634 in 1997 and then to 8000 titles in She briefly discusses the move by major STM publishers to provide WWW-based access to their journals in the period of

11 Much of the enthusiasm for e-journals in the early 1990s was based on specific assumptions: they would be electronic only, they could be peer reviewed, and there would be no charges to their authors and readers. Similarly, concerns about the long term archiving of e-journals and their academic legitimacy hinged on similar assumptions (Kling and Covi, 1995). Today, the major STM publishers who offer electronic versions of their paper journals rely upon a subscription model in which they allow electronic access to individual subscribers or to members of organizations who purchase more expensive institutional (library) subscriptions. These questions about the early "pure" e-journals take on a different character for journals with an established reputation and readership as a paper-based journal that also provides a similar electronic version. The distinction between an e-journal without any paper version and a paper journal with an electronic version matter in trying to make sense of questions about such issues as the legitimacy of e-journals or their costs. For example, we know of no evidence that prestigious paper journals, such as Science, have lost legitimacy after they established online versions in addition to their printed copies. The question of legitimacy seems to affect only the journals that are completely or primarily distributed in electronic form. Similarly, questions of costs will hinge on the number of printed copies a journal produces as well as the character of its electronic form. Last, questions about a journal's accessibility and readership can also hinge on the extent to which it allows readers free access to electronic versions. Following Kling and McKim (1997) we find it useful to distinguish at least three kinds of e-journals: Pure e-journals - the text of the pure e-journal is completely in digital form, and the article is also primarily distributed in digital form. Examples include, the Electronic Journal of Communication, the Journal of Digital information, the Internet Journal of Archaeology, and the Journal of Electronic Publishing. E-p journals journals is primarily distributed electronically, but may have limited distribution in paper form. Examples include the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. P-e journals journals that are primarily distributed in paper form, but which are also distributed in electronic form. Examples include Science, Physical Review, and thousands of other scientific journals. There are many published discussions of the possible benefits of pure e-journals and their advantages over traditional paper journals. However, those discussions often ignore three ideas: First, although beneficial changes may be possible from a technical point of view, the social structure of online publishing does not change as rapidly as the technical structure. Second, possible changes are discussed without distinguishing which type of e- journal they apply to. Third, possible advantages are often analyzed separately, without taking into account how one advantage may tradeoff with another (for example, cost versus the variety of features offered).

12 IV. Models of Electronic Documents and Scholarly Communication Forums The literatures about scholarly electronic publishing are primarily informed by three different conceptual models. One model, which Kling, McKim and King (2001) refer to as the "Standard Model," emphasizes the conventional information processing properties of different media, such as paper and digital. Tn alternative kind of model, a Socio-technical Network Model, characterizes the complex interplay between the information processing features of artifacts and social behavior at many levels of analysis, including its operations/production. According to the Standard Model, an e-journal has certain properties when compared with a paper journal: its articles can be more rapidly reviewed, it can be more rapidly distributed, it is much easier to update or be kept timely, it is arbitrarily expandable, it can be more easily searched, it can include articles that are much richer in their representations (e.g., more pictures and sound recordings), it should be much less expensive for readers, and it should be more readily available to a wider readership (for example Amiran, Orr, & Unsworth, 1991). Some analysts also identify systematic disadvantages of electronic media, such as perishability and the ease of plagiarism (Wells, 1999). Kling, McKim and King (2001) refer to a Socio-technical Network Model that represents media in use as collections of social groups and artifacts that are brought together in intricate and interpenetrating social and technological relationships. The Socio-technical Network Models treat electronic media "in use" as a socio-technical network that brings together participants with different roles, rights, responsibilities, resources flows, legitimacies, and taboo behaviors. In these models, differently structured electronic forums inscribe some of these relationships and behaviors into parts of the medium. In this view, a peer-reviewed e-journal is not just a set of documents on-line. If subscription is limited, unauthorized readers can be excluded by methods such as requiring passwords or access from specific Internet domains. Different parts of the electronic spaces that represent the journal may be structured in different ways. For example, articles are normally write-protected in ways that prevent readers from arbitrarily editing their texts. Other parts of the journal s electronic space may be structured so that editors may privately comment about articles that are under review and allow readers to comment on articles that have been accepted for publication. This last example illustrates how different sets of "roles, rights, and responsibilities" could be inscribed in software, hardware and data files. The Socio-technical Network Models do not just characterize the internal structures and relationships of an electronic forum, but also their relationships with other groups, technologies, and other forums. For example, a specific e-journal may gain a level of legitimacy from the status of the organization that publishes it, from its editorial board, and from the quality of articles that they have attracted in the recent past. Authors and readers of a specific e-journal may also try to publish in or read other competing journals, and also to the search systems that they use to locate journal articles. The Socio-technical Network Models are ecological in that they locate a forum in relationship to an extended network of participants, resources, and competing activities. Later in this chapter we will examine scholarly journals and working papers as Socio-technical Network Models, in comparison with their Standard Models, and analyze how they

13 change our understanding of SEC process. Because Socio-technical Network Models view the social and technical aspects of communication forums separately rather than viewing them as conjoined, they were excluded from our study. Table 1. Models of Forums and Their Collectivities Analytical Focus Standard Model E-Forum & Users' Interaction Socio-Technical (ST) Networks Ecological: E-Forum, Participation, Participants' Interactions in the E-Forums & with other ST-networks & settings Actors Users Individual participants + diverse groups & organizations that influence behavior in the E-Forum Conceptions of Actors Individuals Interactors (participating in multiple overlapping social & ST networks & perhaps in different social settings Treatment of IT Cheap & easy & Configurational socially & by tech "standardized" inscription IT Infrastructure Taken for granted (TFG) Variable, sometimes can be problematic Social Behavior Resource Flows & Business Models E-Forum Legitimacies Can be easily reformed to take advantage of new conveniences, efficiencies and values. TFG TFG Influenced strongly by interactions outside the E-Forums as well as within + E-Forum resources relative to other opportunities elsewhere Examined (includes $ flows, regulatory regimes) Mobilization of support treated as an accomplishment V. Journals Henry Oldenburg produced the first issue of a scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, in 1665 (Schaffner,1994). In 2001, Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory listed over 160,000 periodicals and serials published in the United States and throughout the world. However, this list includes the proceedings of annual conferences and annual reviews, as well as journals. Nonetheless, the number of journals published worldwide is usually estimated to be well over 100,000 and the number of journals has grown steadily and rapidly during the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, information scientists, such as Eugene Garfield, who have used citation data to examine the likely use and impact of journals, have found that only a

14 small fraction of the journals in any field are widely cited, and that the majority of journals are rarely cited, if at all. The journal s form developed over several centuries. For example, abstracts of articles became widespread only in the 20th century. Some analysts argue that innovations in scientific publishing will depend on the development of e-journals (King & Tenopir, 2000: p.??). However, there certainly have been some innovations that have not required the development of pure e-journals or e-p journals. These include article abstracting and indexing databases, the translation of the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index to an electronic form, and journal notification services (via ). It is also arguable that e-memo repositories may in the future play a greater role in scholarly communication than would the p-e journals. Much of the debate on the future of electronic publishing concentrates on opportunities for the readers, writers and publishers. The accessibility of scholarly e- journals, their surpassingly lower production costs, the possibility of multimedia publications and reference linking are treated as compelling features of the medium that will enable them to thrive. The success of e-journals depends on their socio-technical architectures as well as their information processing features. Socio-technical architectures include strategies for structuring the medium (e.g., page appearance and technologies to support it) as well as the social networks of editorial board members and sponsors, access controls (registration, password, fee or free), and so on. Kling (2000) examined the sociotechnical architectures of two "peer-reviewed" pure e-journals the successful Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) and the failing (and now defunct) Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (EJCBS). Since both journals offer similar internet access, the differences in their success must be due to factors other than their use of the Internet to enable authors publish without charge and readers to obtain articles freely. Enthusiasts for e-journals, such as Okerson (2000) and Odlyzko (*01995) often portray the transition of journals from paper to electronic media as a relatively easy process. The Internet is seen as a medium that will be able to solve many of the difficulties associated with traditional publishing. Such views are based on the Standard Model of scholarly communication, and often do not take into account that social changes need to be considered in this process and that they operate on different sets of rules than IT changes do. Connecting the two can be a challenge, but it is essential to the success of the transition of scholarly communication. The issues involved in publishing scholarly e-journals have been summarized and briefly discussed by Buckley et al. (1999) and Wells (1999) among others. Buckley et. al. briefly examine six major issues from the point of view of librarians: access, cataloging and indexing, pricing, archiving, and licensing. Wells lists a set of eight potential advantages and six potential disadvantages of e-journals and provides citations for specific claims abut them. In the next sections we will analyze the most commonly discussed issues from the perspectives of the Standard and Socio-technical Models. 1. Speed of publication There is a common belief that switching from paper to electronic distribution will improve the speed of publication. This would be especially beneficial in fields where the

15 publication process takes years rather than a few months. According to King & Tenopir (2000) it can range from XX to YY, and in some disciplines like economics it can take as long as 3 years (Trivedi, 1993). Time may be saved in the peer review process, in the production process, and in the process of journal distribution. After an author submits an article, it goes through a review process, which could be comparably long for p-journals and e-journals. Some [e.g. Harnad, Nadasdy] advocate alternative forms of review, but we have not found scientific studies that show how much those forms actually improve the speed of publication. We will analyze article review processes later in this chapter. An accepted paper goes through an electronic type setting process. This process can take longer for p-e journals since each version has to be formatted separately. The time needed for type setting pure e-journals depends upon the complexity of the text formatting; an ASCII file can be formatted quickly while SGML coding requires much more work. This process also varies from discipline to discipline: those in which articles are rather text oriented such as many humanities disciplines require less time than in those disciplines were articles are contain graphs or color photography, such as the natural sciences. Other reason for publication delay of printed journals is so called "backlog effect". Paper journals are budgeted to publish a certain number of pages per year. If the manuscripts accepted for publication in a given year exceed this number, they will be published in the next year, thus extending the queue of the articles to be published. E- journals need not experience this type of delay. An accepted manuscript can rapidly be posted on an e-journals web site (after minimal typesetting). Thus a pure e-journal could significantly decrease its publication time, if the publisher decides to post each article separately. The actual practices of posting on the Web vary from journal to journal. For example, the Astrophysical Journal posts the titles and authors of articles as soon as they are accepted for publication. P-e journals published by European publishers and societies tend to distribute both paper and electronic versions almost simultaneously. The American Chemical Society posts individual articles on their website as soon as they finish the review and editing, a format which ACS calls " As Soon As Publishable (ASAP)." This can lead to electronic access being 11 weeks faster than than the print publication (Wilkinson, 1998). Articles available at PubMedCentral may appear two months after their initial print publication. The publishers of pure e-journals can publish their articles on their web site as soon as they are delivered to their editor, especially since many of them request that the author properly format their articles. But editors may wait until they receive more articles to bundle them together as an issue, and thus some potential publishing speed is lost. (For example, the pure e-journal, the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, publishes quarterly, while the pure e-journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, publishes articles when they are accepted for publication.) The claim that electronic publishing substantially decreases publication time is based on the Standard Model of electronic publishing, with the belief that it is possible to publish an article immediately after it is accepted. However, if we analyze the publishing process from the perspective of the Socio-Technical Network Model, we can observe that the process is influenced down by practices that are media-independent forces such as editorial review times, author revision times, and the timing of posting articles.

16 2. Cost Variations in how e-journals are designed and maintained will cause the production costs to vary from journal to journal. Harnad (1995) claims that electronic publishing may be 70%-90% less costly, since pure electronic publishing his only the costs incurred by the peer review process and copy editing. However, the cost of an e- journal may depend on the type of coding used. Formatting manuscripts in ASCII or HTML is relatively inexpensive, while the translation to PDF is more costly; SGML tagging can be the most expensive (Holoviak & Seitter, 1997). Many e-journals distribute their articles in multiple formats to ensure that all viewers have access to a format that their computers can support or that they prefer. Some costs may be shifted from editors to authors by requesting them to provide their articles in specific formats. The inclusion of additional features like multimedia presentations or lengthy data sets will also increase a journals cost. Whisler and Rosenblatt (1997) estimate that electronic versions of a journal may be about 20% less costly because of lower distribution costs, but that those savings will be overridden by the costs of new features. For p-e journals and e-p journals, the costs will be even greater as some costs of printed and electronic versions must be added, even if one version is based on the other. The administrative costs of e-journals may depend on whether they are free to all readers or available only by subscription. One of largest costs (for fee based journals) is the cost of installing and maintaining authentication software and subscriber data. The subscribers to printed journals are responsible for storing and archiving their journal issues, while the e-journal publishers assumes responsibility for organizing, storing and maintaining electronic archives. Estimating the costs of the technology needed to create and maintain a journal in the future is problematic. As Walt Crawford (1998) noted: "Yes, a $2500 PC purchased today is some 75 times as powerful as the $2500 PC of 1988 but that doesn't mean you can buy a useful PC for $33! Technology doesn't work that way: increased performance for a price doesn't mean that prices keep going down for acceptable performance." Bot et al.(2000) calculated the costs of the pure e-journal Electronic Journal of Comparative Law (EJCL) and compared these estimated costs to those of printed law journals, basing their calculation on the prices minus a hypothetical 30 percent profit margin. They estimated that the cost of the e-journal is considerably less; but because their findings are based on estimates and not on actual data, it is difficult to compare them with other studies. Different conclusions were reached by Fisher (1997), who calculated the cost of the MIT Press publishing Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (CJTCS), as a pure e-journal. She compared these costs with those of publishing the print journal Neural Computation (NC). Fisher reports that the production costs were considerably lower for the e-journal (with a difference of 291%). However, when the overhead costs were calculated, they were 1240% higher for CJTCS. The overhead costs consisted of staff labor costs and the costs of hardware and software. The journals relative overhead costs were strongly influenced by the much smaller number of articles published in CJTCS. While reaching different conclusions, the authors of these two different cost analyses agree that estimating the costs of pure e-journals is difficult at this time since the