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Introduction: Scholarly Communication and the STM Serials Pricing Crisis
Abstract: This paper introduces the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) serials pricing crisis, distinguishing it from a temporary crisis in 1996 in humanities and social science publishing in Canada and from the general constraints operating on scholarly publishing. It then reviews the papers selected for inclusion in this volume.
Résumé: Cet article décrit la crise actuelle dans le prix de journaux scientifiques, techniques, et médicaux (STM), distinguant celle-ci d'une crise temporaire en 1996 dans l'édition canadienne en sciences humaines et sociales, ainsi que des contraintes générales s'imposant sur l'édition savante. Cet article passe ensuite en revue les textes sélectionnés pour ce numéro.
The genesis of scholarly communication in the next millennium
It is a sobering thought to realize that, in the space of 50 years, the late Robert Maxwell built a $3 billion empire on scholarly journals. First, immediately following World War II, he was the sole distributor for Springer Verlag. Following that, he set up Pergamon Press, which he sold, shortly before his death, to Elsevier. True, he also used chicanery: his journals were largely restricted to scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals, and the Daily Mirror contributed some profit once he had acquired it in 1984. But the foundations of the $3 billion or so he paid for Macmillan USA had their roots in scholarly publishing (Bower, 1988).
It might even be said that the extensive literature on scholarly publishing exists essentially as an oppositional literature to the activities of Robert Maxwell. True, the research has not been done to determine whether Maxwell was the lead actor or merely a stage stealer from a small group of powerful STM publishers, but there is little doubt that his contribution was considerable.
The literature of which I speak is the library literature on the "serials crisis." It deals with an ongoing struggle between STM publishers and university (and other research) librarians. In essence, the struggle is this. Academic and research librarians and librarians of large urban public institutions, who are acting on behalf of researchers and institutions, pay STM publishers enormous amounts to buy back value-added intellectual property that is donated to them by researchers employed with public funds, usually employees of these purchasing institutions. For their trouble, STM publishers make an enormous return on investment (around 25% of gross revenues). These profit levels have been impeding dissemination of knowledge essentially because they represent overcharging. Such overcharging has forced many cancellations of STM journal subscriptions by even the best and most-well-endowed universities.
On the surface of it, STM publishing contrasts dramatically with humanities and social science (HSS) journal and monograph publishing. STM publishing, like legal and reference publishing, is enormously profitable. HSS publishing can and does turn a decent profit for commercial publishers of U.S. and international titles. But in Canada and many other countries outside the U.S. and U.K., HSS publishing is not profitable. Rather, it receives direct public subsidies (in Canada from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council [SSHRC]).
This superficial difference in profitability is apt to lead to the conclusion that STM publishing is healthy, self-sustaining, and indeed powerful -- powerful enough to command high prices for its content and keep complaining librarians at bay. In contrast, HSS publishing looks weak, requiring continuous public subsidy. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be far more accurate to say that STM publishing manages to lever a level of public subsidy sufficient to cover both operations and profits, whereas HSS publishing, at least in Canada, receives sufficient public subsidy only to cover operations.
How can this be so? The answer is not that complex. Public subsidies come in three forms to both types of journals. First, for both STM and HSS publishing, the generation of content is almost completely underwritten by public funds. Professors (and other publicly supported researchers) receive both salaries and grants to conduct research and prepare articles for publication. Second, the major part of the editorial process -- the solicitation of papers by the academic editor and review by peers -- is undertaken with little or no compensation by the publisher. In other words, the process is undertaken by publicly salaried researchers who take publicly funded time, space, and other resources to perform this professional duty. Third, having received so much, journals ask for and receive more. These additional public funds come in the form of subscription revenue from public institutions, particularly university libraries and government research institutes.
The difference between STM and HSS publishing lies in subscription revenues. STM subscription revenues cover costs and profits, whereas, for Canadian HSS journals, subscription revenues do not even cover operating costs. Why? It would appear that the reason HSS journals undercharge is that historically, the perception has existed in academe that HSS journals are less necessary to the functioning of the humanities and social sciences than are STM journals to the functioning of those disciplines. Therefore, if HSS journals charge their full costs (it is surmised), the price of subscriptions will be too high, leading to cancellations and, for lack of revenue, the HSS journals will cease publication. Whether this is true is both recently untested and, for the moment, moot. The result is that SSHRC is a fourth source of about $3 million in public funding to help Canadian HSS journals balance their books and maintain break-even operations.
What is most interesting is that, based on publishing effort, this HSS regime delivers a far less costly product to the user community than does the STM regime. In other words, after taking into account the extra effort required to deal with presenting scientific, technical, and medical information, it appears that the net return on public expenditures on HSS publishing, including SSHRC subsidies, is far greater than the return on STM publishing. Were STM publishing to be conducted within the same constraints as HSS publishing, considerable public savings would be achieved. Just to drive the point home, by solely using the marketplace to cover publishing costs (over and above content generation and academic editorial and review costs), vast amounts of public funds flow to STM publishers while, by not fully operating within the marketplace, much smaller amounts flow to HSS publishers. (Importance of content should not be taken into account in this equation since the publisher only conveys content, it does not generate content.)
The importance of the above analysis is threefold. First, it points out that that part of the serials crisis that is attributable to publishers overcharging is fairly much confined to STM journals, although, as noted, publishers in other areas are quickly catching on that they, too, can make higher profits. Second, it appears that in the spring of 1996 SSHRC did not understand this situation. This lack of understanding, in combination with loose accounting practices by scholarly associations and inadequate financial analysis and advice to SSHRC, caused SSHRC to withdraw but then reinstate about $1 million in subsidies to over 130 HSS journals (Penrod, 1996). Third, the analysis presented is not the complete story of the serials pricing crisis.
The other major element is this. Following World War II, there was a great expansion of universities in the Western world and, hence, numbers of university faculty. Coincident with that expansion was an increased emphasis, in all disciplines, on the carrying out of research and reporting results. For instance, in the English-speaking world in the social sciences prior to the 1960s, a notable career of teaching and research, especially in Britain, might consist of the publication of a dozen journal articles and culminate in the publication of a single monograph. In contrast, beginning in the 1960s, especially in the U.S., multiple monographs, in addition to copious journal articles and book chapters, increasingly became the norm for productive, yet not outstanding, academics. In science, monographs were less the rage. The value of researchers came to be measured more and more in the number of published articles in refereed journals and a pecking order developed among the various journals in each field. Both tenure and promotion committees and peer evaluators making decisions on research grants looked for a "solid body of work" that could give them the confidence to grant further funding. Not to put too fine a point on it, as everyone's work load increased and specialization became the order of the day, where scientists in a single discipline sometimes had little understanding of the significance of their peers' work, quantification of output in a hierarchical order of peer-reviewed and, therefore, peer-approved journals became an easy way to evaluate a scholar's progress. Yes, it was crude but the prestige of the journals added some refinement. In addition, citation indexes were constructed in an attempt to refine the system further. So scholars developed strategies to get their articles accepted in prestigious journals and adapted the styles to maximize citation of themselves and their colleagues. Publishers took advantage of this overall situation, especially when they were managing prestigious journals. They founded and assumed ownership (not just management responsibility) of new journals in areas where there was an overload of articles. They matched institutional subscription fees of the existing prestigious journals, thereby bestowing them with an instant credibility and equality. And onward went the spiral of production and increased costs.
The system was workable (if costly) and it minimized the need for (and the resulting friction from making) personal qualitative evaluation of one's colleagues. The main disadvantages of this regime were that it was costly and, equally as important, scholars came to be rewarded on the basis of piecework, an exploitative system, the ills of which can be recited by any labour historian. Most interesting in that labour history is the downward slide of product quality.
In short, over and above greedy publishers, the numbers of scholars, the emphasis on research publication, and the lack of incentives anywhere in the university community to reward the refusal to purchase the ever-increasing plethora of publications, created an ever-spiraling upward increase in the number of publications and vastly increased costs to the scholarly community and, hence, to the public. The worst situation, obviously, developed in STM serials, basically because all these forces were combined. This occurred because of the prestige of science, the potential economic reward that can be derived from scientific knowledge, and the fact that, as Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and Watson and Crick demonstrated, science has the power to turn the world on its ear. But the proliferation of HSS publishing, both in article and monograph form, was not to be ignored.
A Canadian response to the STM journal pricing crisis
In the context of the STM serials pricing crisis (and years of discussion among librarians), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and l'Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) put together a collaboration with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), the membership of which is university and college presidents, and convened a task force. After the requisite set of meetings, an interim discussion paper was produced, Towards a New Paradigm for Scholarly Communication (AUCCCARL /ABRC, 1995). The discussion paper brought forward a good many issues that had been explored within the library community in the literature surrounding the journals crisis.
While the report was certainly useful, reflective of its full name (the AUCCCARL /ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication), it was also quite narrow in conception. Essentially, while opting for a scholar-centred enterprise in an attempt to conceptualize a way of freeing the system from greedy publishers, in fact, the report defined the issues within library and university administrative concerns: for example, levels of spending and locus of control.
This perspective was maintained in the final report, The Changing World of Scholarly Communication (AUCCCARL /ABRC, 1996). A short summary of those points provides a useful context. (See Appendix 2 for the full set of recommendations.) The report began with the notion that technological change is having a major impact on knowledge creation and communication. At the same time, it noted a limited awareness within the scholarly community that scholarly communication is threatened by the volume of material being created, its organization, and its cost.
The awareness of the community to these issues needs to be raised at all levels and amongst all users and participants. Libraries must develop "best practices" for ensuring that they can serve the information needs of their clients, and they need to share these practices. The foundation on which such practices can emerge is a better understanding of usage. Assisted by governments, universities should give high priority to the development of their telecommunications and computing infrastructure, including training, for all scholars and students. To broaden access, libraries should digitize unique collections according to accepted standards and co-ordinate other digitization. Broad community support for appropriately peer-reviewed electronic publishing and support for not-for-profit scholarly publishing should be forthcoming. A central clearing house or registry for electronic publishing projects should be established. The role of copyright should be discussed within the university community and Bill C-32 should be passed with allowance for interlibrary loan and educational and library exceptions on copying. Further legislation on fair dealing should be developed.
Finally, the report suggested that the scholarly community review its tenure and promotion procedures with an eye to emphasizing quality over quantity of publications.
These points are both insightful and valid. However, the difficulty with the interim and final reports is that, while nodding at scholars, it does not adequately address the need to define the necessary elements of an effective system of scholarly communication to serve the interests of scholars and of society. Moreover, in not bringing scholars, academic presses, disciplinary associations, journal editors, students, and others to the table, both the interim and the final report of the task force failed to take into account the established interests and commitments of all parties and to use them as a foundation for developing a framework to rationalize scholarly and especially STM publishing.
For an effective addressing of the issues, the communication needs of the research and education community, and also the communication between that community and the broader community must be reviewed and addressed. All interests must be brought forward: the general social interest, scholars as knowledge producers, scholars and others within and outside the academy as knowledge consumers, students, faculty associations as representatives of the interests of scholars as employees, research- and journal-funding agencies, journal editors, the individual disciplines and areas of study, university and other librarians, university administrators who oversee both research and academic concerns, university presidents, journal owners, journal publishers, journal editors, and technology representatives who have something to contribute to new modes of journal production.
A co-operative effort
It was in this context and as part of my role as director of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University and editor of this journal, that I set out to obtain funds for a conference designed to bring together representatives of all these interests. I informed AUCC and CARL of my intentions and, as a result, University of British Columbia Librarian Ruth Patrick contacted me. Ruth Patrick suggested running a conference hosted jointly by UBC and Simon Fraser University. Such a conference would take advantage of the focus of concern on publishing at Simon Fraser's Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. It would also capitalize on a major initiative at UBC involving her and John Gilbert, co-ordinator of Health Sciences, in his role as chair of the Senate Library Committee at UBC. They and others were assessing the information needs of UBC and how to address them using technology and organization. Third, it would bring in a greater range of concerns than existed at Simon Fraser, particularly in the health sciences through John Gilbert. Seeing the wisdom of this approach, we formed a joint local committee and a national committee to hold a major conference, Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium (SCNM). Lorimer, Patrick, and Gilbert, acting as the executive committee, hired Deborah Kirby as executive director and, with valuable guidance from both the local and national committees, created the conference.
An overview of the selected papers
The importance of these issues both to the scholarly community and the public was underlined by the willingness of a large number of public and private sector sponsors to assist the conference (see Appendix 3 for the list of sponsors) and the presence of both Secretary of State for Science and Technology Jon Gerrard and British Columbia Minister of Education Paul Ramsey.
Usage
In fact, Roberta Lamb's opening paper focuses exactly on the value and dynamics of scholarly publishing in the context of society as a whole. Lamb's research, conducted in California, examines the use made of scholarly publications by various companies and institutions, including the courts. She analyzes how they make use of research published in journals and determine expertise. Her work is representative rather than exhaustive. As most social scientists and humanists know, the mass media are large consumers of research and expertise. Indeed, magazines of commentary feed off research and knowledge generated by universities in the same way that drug companies have an insatiable appetite for scientific journal articles and expert authors.
Two papers carry this usage analysis forward but within the academy. Erwin Warkentin analyzes how scholars within departments of German use traditional and electronic journals, characterizing his colleagues as probably conservative. In performing this analysis, he points to many salient elements affecting the future of electronic journals, some technical, but many not. Ruth Noble and Carol Coughlin provide a parallel analysis carried out across Canada of journal usage of academic chemists. Both indicate a lower level of usage than one might expect, a factor that is significant for two reasons. First, it provides insight into the dynamics of information flows among scholars and the use made of libraries. Second, it is a critical factor for publishers contemplating replacing subscription fees with user fees. The papers also provide insights into the infrastructure required at the user level for going electronic.
Both these papers provide needed information. We have very little analysis of how scholars use journals and, indeed, all information sources. Journal publishers would have us believe that scholars, and especially scientists, as well as professionals, cannot exist without constant reference to journals. Yet it appears that active established researchers make far less use of journals than one might expect, not only in the humanities and social sciences but also the sciences. To some degree, it appears, they rely on graduate students writing papers or younger colleagues to keep them somewhat current with the literature. But it also appears that once they understand an area and have some sense of the orientation and direction of colleagues close to them, through exchange of e-mail, occasional journal checks, conversation within research groups, and so forth, they manage to understand what is going on and what is likely to go on.
What then is the value of journals? Certainly students use them to bring themselves up to speed in an area. Scholars out of the loop of active researchers may use journals more frequently to keep abreast of research (but we really do not know). Conference organizers may search the literature for active researchers, as we did for this conference. And there are users such as the media, companies, and institutions identified by Lamb. There is also the value of the publication process itself. Submitting a paper to a journal for publication and having it accepted confirms one's position as a scholar who can identify a problem and design, conduct, and report the research at a level acceptable to one's peers.
Usage of journals has at least one other dimension, which might be called user friendliness. In the print world, the accessibility of the ideas contained in the text is addressed first by editors. Editors, both academic and professional, ensure that both the writing and the investigative and analytical procedures used are both defensible and comprehensible. To editing is added the dynamics of layout, typography, printing, and binding to ensure the text is easily read and understood, even pleasing in its presentation to the reader. Viewed at another level, publishers address the accessibility of the ideas by presenting the information developed in research in a multitude of market formats. Thus, the Economist puts its unique spin on economic research and reflection; newspaper columnists and newsletter publishers present health information; and so forth.
Fytton Rowland and Ian Bell's perspective on the accessibility of ideas in the world of electronic publishing is based on work reported in three studies conducted in the U.K. Rowland and his co-authors draw attention to ergonomic factors in electronic publishing, by which they mean quality and organization of the graphic presentation. They note that such variables and the ability to add value will play an important role in determining how electronic scholarly journals are perceived. The importance of this paper is not only for what it reports. The paper represents the tip of the entire user interface iceberg, which, in the end, involves the full communicational capacity of the medium -- sound, image, and text.
The physical-access infrastructure for scholarship
The accessibility of ideas is but one level of overall accessibility. Physical access is another, whether it involves the presence of a print copy of an article in a library identifiable by an end-user; the proper shelving of a volume; appropriate collection building; or the half-life of the medium on which the article is recorded. Two articles in this volume address this issue.
First, Margot Montgomery analyzes the role of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). CISTI serves the Canadian and, to some extent, the North American scientific community as a central resource for scientific information published anywhere. Montgomery describes CISTI's operations and its philosophy of operation. For Canadian science, CISTI extends this role, reaching back to individual scholars and publishing their research papers. As Aldyth Holmes points out in her paper, CISTI publishes 14 scientific journals covering a variety of fields, two of which are published in electronic form. Since Montgomery's paper was written, CISTI has laid important groundwork for the development of electronic publishing by announcing its willingness to assist Canadian journals to publish in electronic form and even provide space on its server.
While Montgomery's paper addresses the organization of an information institution, Tom Delsey of the National Library of Canada addresses specific developments in the access and archiving function of electronic documents. The key issues brought forward by Delsey deal with legal deposit of electronic publications, the technical infrastructure needed to support the management and long-term preservation of electronic collections, standards for electronic document encoding, proprietary rights to information, and the implications for library services to researchers. Not only does he make apparent the work in progress but also, for scholars, Delsey provides a sense of the taken-for-granted infrastructure already in place for print materials.
Production, finance, and electronic journals
Given the STM serials crisis and the general financial constraints operating on scholarly journals and on scholarly communication as a whole, in our call for papers we were hoping to attract research that would provide some financial and organizational details on the operations of both print and electronic journals. We were not disappointed. Aldyth Holmes, the senior editor of CISTI's 14 print and two parallel electronic journals (officially of the National Research Council of Canada, CISTI's parent organization) provided one such paper. Holmes analyzes the costs of print and electronic journal publication in the sciences, arguing that substantial savings are not to be gained by a switch from print to electronic technologies.
Holmes' discussion is complemented by two papers. First, to replace a paper entitled "Escaping the Giant: A Real Life Story about Becoming a Society Publisher," we were able to obtain a paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Association of Scholarly Publishing in May 1997, in Vancouver. Leaving electronic publishing aside, publishing consultant Walter Ludwig analyzes the added costs and added value of journals administered by large commercial journal publishers. According to his analysis, they do not exist -- at least not at an affordable price. On a revenue base of $342,000, using charging levels common to some publishers, a commercially published journal would result in a net cost to a scholarly society of $45,000. Self-published by the society, it could generate a net income of $76,000 after amortization of one-time costs of approximately $25,000. The significant shift in income that Ludwig reports parallels the findings of the above-mentioned paper presented by Rod Parrish at the conference. In the case of Parrish's journal, an increased number of articles and an increased number of articles with the same word count per page were able to be achieved for approximately the same production costs.
A further complement to Holmes' analysis was provided by Michael Jensen. For some time, under Jensen's direction, Johns Hopkins University Press has been carrying out an electronic publishing project called Project Muse. This project provides a package of up to 40 electronically published journals to libraries for a negotiated fee based on a number of factors. As of this writing 216 libraries are involved, 75 of which have subscribed to the complete 40-journal package. As background, Jensen describes the publishing system of the former Soviet Union. It was a system driven by a production mentality independent of the tastes of the market and independent of the ability of the consumer to purchase. When communism collapsed, not only were the vast warehouses of unsellable books exposed, but also, working under the requirement to become profitable, presses found themselves turning to pornography to support their new-found freedom to publish important Western books.
Electronic publishing provides much the same opportunity for producer-driven publishing. It also provides the opportunity for the electronic equivalent both of pornography and vast warehouses of unread material. How to make electronic publishing work for the purposes of scholarly communication is the key. Jensen argues that, at least currently, electronic publishing does not lower costs to any great degree. Further, in an environment where so much is available for free on the Web and so many are able to become Web "publishers," it is difficult to collect needed revenues. Indeed, if collected on a user-pay basis, it is doubtful whether electronic scholarly publishing is feasible at all. Coming from such a prestigious publisher as Johns Hopkins, these are sobering thoughts indeed. They certainly bring into question claims that dramatic savings are possible by moving into publication in electronic form.
Experimentation and reflection
Jonathan Borwein and Richard Smith take the discussion of electronic publishing into the details that have the potential to make or break journals. It is certainly true that electronic technology can provide added value to scholarly communication. Possibilities of video clips, sound, and access to raw data are often mentioned as adding value. E-mail correspondence has already created larger, more dynamic research communities unaffected by geography. However, as Borwein and Smith state explicitly, and as the force of this collection makes clear, a migration from print on paper to electronic publishing implies a good deal more than stopping the presses and placing files on servers. Borwein and Smith examine four dimensions -- the technological, commercial, scholarly, and administrative -- and conclude that while electronic publishing technology may offer greater control to journals in production and dissemination, in the processing of revenues an increased dependency on other commercial institutions may result, particularly in the processing of payments.
David Beattie and David McCallum examine electronic journal publishing focusing on the efforts of the virtual products division of Industry Canada. Citing their own projects and commissioned studies on electronic publishing, they claim a potential for great savings by moving to centralized electronic journal publishing.
Of scholars and students and scholarly communication
Writing as the chair of the librarian's committee of CAUT, Ken Field provides a wide-ranging paper important for its representation of the issues surrounding electronic publishing and communication from the viewpoint of the scholar. Field's early point, that the emphasis on journal article publication by universities in their evaluations of professors might be reduced, is interesting for its rejection of the notion that scholarship can be equated with numbers of publications. If the professional association representing the professoriate is willing to take such a position, it would seem that the scholarly publishing system is not operating as it should.
Field points to the need for recognition of the full range of scholarly activities -- inquiry, teaching, collegial interaction, reviewing, research, and research reporting. He discusses the pre-eminent role of publishing for scholars, the various types of publications that are evolving, and the need for scholars to maintain control over their intellectual property. He also describes national initiatives for technological development and his interpretations of studies on cost savings that electronic publishing can achieve.
The disturbing element associated with Field's paper is the relatively low level of faculty concern with scholarly publishing issues. That lack of concern was manifest at the conference (and the response to the call for papers) in almost complete absence of faculty members qua faculty members speaking of their concerns about scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in general or in their particular discipline. To some extent, this lack of interest is difficult to understand. One would think that, if a system of professional communication were under threat, a significant percentage of professionals would be concerned. On the other hand, the area is very charged. Speaking as both a scholar and a journal editor, I am aware that, for many HSS scholars, especially where refusal rates reach 80% (in contrast to refusal rates in the sciences around 20%), submitting articles to journals is something to be endured and avoided if at all possible. Were the journal system to collapse, for many HSS scholars it would be a great relief. It would certainly diminish the publish-or-perish ethic and might lead to more fruitful and more thoughtful collaborations. The paradox is that while "productivity" as measured in numbers of scholarly articles would decrease, and the net cost to society would also decrease, the development and dissemination of useful and insightful knowledge might actually increase.
It is always useful to remember that, assessed at the level of the university or research institution, rather than generating revenue, scholarly productivity costs. Examined beyond the level of the university, after knowledge has fully worked itself through society, knowledge is beyond costing, since it forms the very fabric of society. However, because knowledge-producing nations are rich, rather than poor, one would be hard put to argue that there is an overall net cost to knowledge production.
The second underrepresented group at the conference was students. PhD candidate Richard Nimijean, fresh from his sojourn as senior policy analyst for AUCC responsible for the task force on scholarly communication, and hence a major contributor to the engagement of the task force and its reports, provides the student perspective. The crux of his argument is this: in the face of an oversupply of qualified candidates for the few academic jobs that are now available, the only strategy that makes sense for a young academic is to publish as much and as quickly as possible. To ask young scholars to take any responsibility for an overabundance of articles is to ask that she or he set aside career interests, even the chance at a career, in favour of the general interests of the scholarly community. It is not going to happen.
Scholarship and communicational form
With the context set by electronic publishing activities, Marlene Manoff addresses the rather fundamental McLuhanesque question: How are electronic publishing and retrieval technologies affecting scholarship? Just as the medium of print organizes scholarly inquiry, so, as she points out, technological tools can facilitate certain types of research, whether or not they have great value. Similarly, libraries' decisions to accommodate new technologies can affect scholarship quite significantly, determining what is readily available and what is not. Electronic technology can also affect the creation of scholarly editions and such fundamentals as the creation of canons.
The future according to...
The final paper of this collection was written by Gregory Newby who, with Robin Peek (1996), has put together a valuable collection of papers entitled Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Newby takes as a given that electronic communications will come to dominate in the scholarly community in the not-too-distant future. He points out how it is already serving scholars interests well, especially for informal communication, but that this may remain quite independent of formal journal and monograph publishing. His paper stimulates consideration of how informal electronic communication may evolve into formal exchanges of a different form than formal journal articles as we know them. Perhaps Newby's most important point is that the capacities of electronic communication are developing quickly and dramatically. Scholarly communication can benefit, provided that an appropriately positive but sceptical attitude is maintained and, largely building on current library structures and services, a proper infrastructure for creation, publication, storage, retrieval, and access is built.
References
AUCCCARL /ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication. (1995). Towards a new paradigm for scholarly communication. Ottawa: Author.
AUCCCARL /ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication. (1996). The changing world of scholarly communication: Challenges and choices for Canada. Ottawa: Author.
Bower, Tom. (1988). Maxwell: The Outsider. London: Aurum.
Peek, Robin, & Newby, Gregory (Eds.). (1996). Scholarly publishing: The electronic frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Penrod, Lynn. (1996, March 28). Memorandum to grant applicants. Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.