• Home
• About
• Log In
• Register
• Search
• Current
• Back Issues
• Announcements
• Books For Review
• Theses
• Video/Abstracts
• Survey

Home > Vol 22, No 3 (1997) > Holmes

Electronic Publishing in Science: Reality Check

Aldyth Holmes (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information)

Abstract: The role of the primary publisher in the changing context of today's scholarly communication is explored in the face of the electronic publishing debate. NRC Research Press's experience provides practical data by examining the costs of implementing electronic versions of Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences and the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology. Data on early patterns of use, some associated outcomes, and a comparison of information from other scholarly publishers are presented. It is concluded that electronic journals are not significantly less expensive to produce than paper publications. The relative merits of various methods for recovering costs in an electronic environment are compared in order to identify and address specific problems.

Résumé: Nous explorons le rôle de l'éditeur dans le contexte changeant de la communication savante aujourd'hui en nous penchant sur les débats entourant l'édition électronique. L'expérience des Presses scientifiques du CNRC nous a permis d'obtenir des données sur les coûts de publier deux de ses revues savantes sous forme électronique, soit le Journal canadien des sciences halieutiques et aquatiques et la Revue canadienne de physiologie et pharmacologie. Nous discutons des données sur l'usage que les premiers lecteurs ont fait de ces revues ainsi que de résultats connexes, et nous comparons l'expérience des Presses scientifiques à celles d'autres éditeurs de publications savantes. Nous concluons que les journaux savants électroniques ne sont pas tellement moins chers à produire que les publications traditionnelles. Nous comparons différentes méthodes de récupérer les dépenses pour les revues électronique afin d'identifier et d'aborder certains problèmes.

Introduction: The role of the publisher

Publishing has always played a key role in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) scholarly communication. It performs the social function of conferring what Professor Lederburg called "dignity" on the work (Lederburg, 1996). This dignity is conferred by the imprimatur of the editors and gives the author prestige that assists in attracting students, grants, and promotions. Underlying this prestige is the practical validation or filtering function carried out by the editors, supported by the reviewers, who screen the material, excluding inaccurate or incomplete information. Publication organizes material to help accessibility, grouping articles in related areas in particular publications and providing abstracts, keywords, and indexes. It provides the raw material for archives so that information 50 or 100 years old can still be located and retrieved. Some of these functions are delegated by the primary publisher to secondary publishers and librarians, but they are still integral parts of the scholarly communication process. The publication format, paper or electronic, does not change the need for the services that the publishers and librarians provide, but rather changes the way in which dissemination of the information is undertaken. The conclusion is that as long as scholars need a social structure that validates their work so that it will be funded, and a practical structure for locating and retrieving useful information, the activities now carried out by the publisher will be required, so there is a need for an economic structure to support this process.

As computer networks have matured and global telecommunications have become an affordable reality, a debate has raged over the future of paper as the medium for scholarly communication. We should first acknowledge the fact that the process of publishing is not necessarily central to STM communication. The sharing of esoteric information among experts in a particular field is occurring at conferences and in informal exchanges through electronic mail. Those who are actively engaged in scholarship in a specific field have their "invisible colleges" with whom they regularly share information. This research information will then become the subject of a formal paper and published so that it is available to those outside the "in-crowd." The publishing process makes information available in a form that has been validated; the rough edges that were the subject of debate in the invisible college are smoothed out and the material is organized into a clearly recognizable and retrievable format that can be stored for the students of today and the scholars of tomorrow, with the author's name clearly attached to the work.

Will this change in a world of electronic publishing? The paper journal has been with us for a long time; the Royal Society published its first transactions in 1665. Standards have evolved for the scientific paper; it represents an efficient and concise way of communicating the results of research. However, the electronic format presents new opportunities. Scholars are exploring the potential of the new medium, and we are at the beginning of an age of transition, but the same imperatives of accuracy and accessibility will apply. While the scholars have always been accountable for the accuracy of the scholarship, it is the publishers and librarians who have made it accessible. Can or will this model continue in the electronic world? The librarians have been supported financially by the scholars' institutions or the state. The publishers have found various models. The not-for-profit publishers rely on financial support from the members of their societies or on government funding, plus cost recovery from the scholars or their institutions via page charges and subscriptions. The commercial publishers pay scholars to support the publication process and are also able to get volunteer labour to support the peer-review process. As scholars begin to insist on compensation for the time they spend as editors and reviewers, the costs of the product will increase. As costs go up, subscription prices rise, libraries cancel subscriptions, and unit costs are forced up even further. Can electronic publishing break this vicious circle?

NRC Research Press

To understand the background to the economics of scholarly publishing, one must first examine the use of the material being published. It is difficult for a publisher to assess the usage of journals published in paper; copyright revenue, the only direct measure, represents a mere 0.2% or less of the revenue stream, as most copying is done claiming fair dealing / fair use exemptions. Librarians make studies of usage to justify cancellations. Citation data are extremely limited in that they show nothing about the use of the information by the non-publishing community -- for example, the student or industrial development scientist -- or about the incidence of "read but not cited." The publisher is responsible only for delivering the journal to the individual or institution, so the only data available are about the subscribers. The following information about the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (CJFAS), one of the top three in its field, is typical of the information a publisher has on usage. This journal is now available in both paper and electronic formats. It is individuals who cite material from journals, but, as in the case of CJFAS, it is primarily institutions who subscribe to them. Figure 1 shows the international scope of the journal's purchasers and the split between institutional and personal subscribers.

Information on the electronic version of the journal after a year of availability takes a different form. We can see which articles are being accessed, and we can analyze the source of the enquiry to a limited extent. The high number of unresolved Internet provider (IP) addresses (that cannot be traced to a source) makes this information of minimal usefulness beyond the fact that the journal is indeed reaching readers around the world in its electronic format. Of the addresses that could be resolved, in one month 27% of the hits came from outside North America, 31% from the U.S.A., and 42% from Canada. None of this information addresses the question of who is actually reading the journal.

17P 26P 1 Types of Subscribers to CJFAS by Type and Geographic Location

But, for the first time, we have a means of observing which papers are being accessed. This is a change from determining which journals get most citations. Information on citation of individual articles in paper journals is available, at considerable expense, but this is not a measure of the true use of the article or the interest it generated. In the electronic world we have a means of measuring these. Figure 2 shows the number of times each paper was accessed in its second month of release. (The second month was chosen in order to eliminate differences in loading dates.) This access relates to the (fixed) portable document format (PDF) file and, unlike the tables of contents, should not include Web crawlers or maintenance access. The x axis shows the range of hits or accesses during the month and the y axis the number of papers that fall into each access level. Over the eight months covered, a typical paper was accessed 10 to 20 times in its second month of publication.

It is possible for the publisher, when gathering the above information, to identify the papers being accessed. This information is routinely passed to the journal editor to assist in editorial decisions about areas of current interest where papers should be encouraged. The one paper that registered over 100 hits in a month was Yves Prairie's "Evaluating the Predictive Power of Regression Models," which deals with a subject of interest beyond the field of aquatic science. This suggests that electronic publication makes it far easier for people to find relevant information in publications outside their field. In other words, electronic publication improves dissemination by compensating for the filtering that occurs when an author elects to publish in a particular journal.

14.5P 26P 2 Access to Full-text Articles in CJFAS

Cost considerations

Peer review

NRC Research Press is a not-for-profit publisher, publishing 14 scientific and technical journals. Our production process is fairly typical of those of medium-sized, high-quality publishers. Costs are incurred at each stage by the various parties contributing to the scholarly communication process. Three major categories of activity incur costs: filtering, accessibility, and dissemination. The components of these activities are shown in Table 1.

These activities have to be undertaken regardless of the format of communication. If any one of these activities is overlooked, the process of communication from author to reader is inhibited. In the various models of scholarly communication under discussion at this conference, the effect of changing models is to move the costs incurred for each activity in the process from one participant to another in the hope that someone will undertake the activity on a volunteer basis, thus absorbing the costs and reducing the burden on the institutional budget as it is presently structured.

The authors' costs

As a publisher, I have no direct knowledge of the costs incurred by authors in preparing a paper. We receive papers from around the world and see only the reaction to a request to submit in particular electronic formats. It is a relief to know that, for about 95% of the papers submitted, we can get diskettes in major software packages that we can read. There are still some problem areas in the world, and we have to face the fact that for some time yet we may have to bear the cost of rekeying some papers to create an electronic version suitable for the publication process. We are increasingly able to get electronic files of images; these too facilitate publication. In fact, we are continually challenged to keep our own hardware and software up to the levels of some leading-edge authors who submit material to us; had we fewer titles, this investment would be hard to justify. How would the authors' costs change in an electronic publishing environment? I can only speculate that the pressure to have the best possible equipment and connectivity, or the ability to produce material in formats acceptable to publishers or attractive to readers, would become as intense as the pressure to secure funds for the research itself.

The author is responsible for the first stage of filtering the information when he selects the vehicle for publication that is most likely to reach the audience with whom the information is to be shared. There may be other reasons for selecting a particular publication, such as prestige or ease of acceptance, but these are matters of ethics for the scholarly community and not for public comment by a publisher.

The peer-review process

At NRC Research Press, we do not generally pay editors, but we do contract with the editor's institution to pay for the office support necessary to run the peer-review process. The costs of these editorial offices have increased 61% in the last 10 years. In comparison, inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index has been approximately 34% over the same period. The reason for this cost increase seems, on examination, to be that the institutions are unwilling to donate as many services and facilities as they were in the past. Once, the universities would willingly donate free office space, furniture, and postage, but this is changing rapidly; all institutions expect the publisher to cover the cost of postage, computers, and equipment for the office, and an increasing number are requesting that space be rented from the institution. So far we have had two requests to fund editors, either directly or indirectly by funding replacement teachers. This may be indicative of a future trend. The community of scholars, or their institutions, is becoming less willing to support the validation process without financial recompense. These expenses all relate to the peer-review process. If the integrity and accuracy of scholarly communication are to be maintained, the peer-review process must continue to be funded regardless of the format of communication. The electronic review process can save postage but someone has to ensure that all reviewers have machines and connections powerful enough to receive and view the large, complex files that make up some scientific articles. In the electronic world, the demand to include MPEG files in scientific publications is just emerging. Addressing the problems does not require technology, but rather investment in the infrastructure to support electronic publishing, particularly the peer-review process. Is it appropriate to restrict the review process to those peers who have the necessary hardware on their desktops? If connectivity and hardware play a key role in the success of electronic publications, those costs will not be borne by the publisher or the library, but by the departments that pay for the computers and by the administration that provides the connectivity. On the American Association of Higher Education Newsgroup (AAHESGIT), a recent discussion on the cost of computer technology at the desktop came up with a figure of U.S.$5,000 to $7,400 as the direct cost per year per machine in an academic environment (Bantz, 1996). The cost of postage to ship manuscripts around for peer review (an average of $21 per manuscript for a full review with a minimum of two reviewers) has just been shifted from the publisher to the reviewer's institution, which provides the communication infrastructure.

Preparing material for publication

Once a paper has gone through the peer-review process, the author has made all the necessary revisions to the content, and the paper has been accepted for publication, that is, it has passed through the second stage of filtering, the material then has to be prepared for publication. Despite titles such as New England Journal of Medicine, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Journal of the American Chemical Society, STM publications are typically global in nature. The first language of the author may not be the language in which he or she is publishing. Of the papers NRC publishes, 53% originate outside Canada. Figure 3 shows the sources of articles published in all 14 titles.

While the use of either British or American spelling may not impede communication, it may impede access (Ito, 1996). The use of unusual or colloquial grammatical structures can slow a reader down. For an international readership, the language of the article must be internationally comprehensible. This is where the work of copy editors comes in. These are highly skilled people; it takes about nine months to train a scientific copy editor to NRC Research Press standards. This quality-upgrading function is independent of format.

20.25P 26P 3 Articles by Source

It is at this point that the costs of producing an electronic versus a paper journal start to diverge: the prepublication processes differ for electronic and paper publication. Nor are these processes stable; they are constantly being re-engineered to take advantage of technology. The average costs of publishing in paper and paper plus electronic formats, based on eight months' financial data for 14 scientific journals, are summarized in Table 2. These data include all the costs associated with the learning curve involved in the transition from paper to electronic format and the re-engineering of existing processes, and may not be indicative of the long-term costs. They do, however, highlight the possibility of economies of scale when overhead is spread over more titles or pages.

Based on the subscription prices for 1996, the average revenue per journal page was $306.18, which when compared with the costs in Table 2 shows the extent to which NRC currently subsidizes scholarly communications. NRC has been gradually reducing its subsidy to the publishing operation; in 1995, the average cost per page was $376.16, for average revenue per page of $275.12. As we gain experience in the production of electronic journals, we have observed that the lines between the tasks blur as individuals take on different tasks to make the process more efficient. The goal is always to get papers out as quickly as possible without any loss in quality.

The publisher provides the authoring community with editing and layout services, and also deals with the business aspects of distribution, protecting authors' rights to the material by handling copyright, and also by passing the material to secondary publishers for indexing and abstracting to increase the accessibility of the work. These services facilitate scientific communication by making the work easier to read, on screen or on paper, and increasing access to it. Ease of access and reading allows information to be transferred from author to reader as expeditiously as possible.

a.

Coding and tagging is integrated with editing when material is prepared for contract typesetting, but is performed by layout staff in the in-house process. More extensive coding and tagging is required for the electronic product.

b.

Includes management, facilities, maintenance, business systems, sales, marketing, subscription fulfillment, equipment, hardware, software, connectivity, and network support.

Access and dissemination

Once the electronic files are ready for publication, the dissemination process for electronic products diverges totally from that for the paper versions. For electronic publications, the file has to be further processed to facilitate access. The table of contents has to be prepared in HTML format; this is still onerous for titles with Greek characters, subscripts, and superscripts. Technology is catching up and simplifying the process, but whether readers will have the high-level browsers that enable them to see the special characters remains to be seen. Simple bookmarks are added to the articles and, as technology allows the process to become more automated, more internal links will be added. The file for each article has to be linked to the table of contents. The value added is limited only by the cost of adding it! The files are loaded onto the Web site, which, along with the links to the various indexing sources, have to be maintained. A whole new area of marketing is necessary to get links to and from other related sites, no mean task when one is dealing with titles in 14 different disciplines.

For publication on paper, the files go to an image setter and then plates are loaded on the printing press. Up to this point, the costs are all independent of the number of copies produced and distributed. The press operates and the copies are bound, packaged, and distributed. As shown in Table 2, printing and distribution costs account for between 15% and 17% of the total production costs of NRC's scientific journals. Commercial publishers are able to charge their overheads to a much wider range of publications, some with high profit margins.

Savings

There are widely divergent views on the savings to be achieved by moving to electronic publication. Harnad claims that the true cost of electronic publishing offers a 75% saving over paper (Okerson & O'Donnell, 1995). However, his electronic-only publishing model has serious limitations for international journals that aim to serve the whole community and not just those connected to the Internet. Science publishers such as the American Chemical Society (Okerson & O'Donnell, 1995) and the American Physical Society (Lustig, 1996), who recognize the need to keep paper versions of their journals available in order to reach the full international community and so are publishing in parallel formats, produce cost breakdowns similar to those of NRC Research Press. Because of the complexity of the technical terms and mathematics in STM publications, copy editing seems to take more time and skill than are being invested in the same process in humanities and social science journals. It is impossible to determine if this is a function of the language skills of the authors, the international sources of the material being processed, or the standards being set by individual disciplines. The Canadian Journal of Communication is claiming savings of 25% by going electronic; however, savings in distribution and printing costs of the paper version are offset by the increased costs of the expertise required to support the electronic product (Brandao, 1996).

Based on less than one year of producing electronic versions of only two titles, NRC Research Press has found that the electronic versions, produced in parallel with the paper versions, are costing an extra $20.61 per page, or 6% more than a paper-only journal. This compares with the American Physical Society's figure of U.S.$10 per page quoted by Lustig (1996). As the processes are refined, costs will be reduced, but it seems unlikely that the spread will change, as many of the technological improvements made in order to produce the electronic version can be equally applied to the paper version.

Potential problems of electronic distribution

The instability of electronic products leads to the risk of valuable research being lost to future generations. The early electronic journals did not keep up their archives, they changed URLs (Harter & Kim,1996), and generally became invisible. NRC hopes to be able to assist the small Canadian STM scholarly publishers to move into the electronic world by providing advice and electronic distribution. Concern has been expressed that commercialization of the Internet will limit its availability to scholars. Already congestion is not unknown. As we work to solve the challenge of putting electronic publications on the shelves of the virtual library for NRC scientists across the country, we see an opportunity to add other titles to our collection by sharing our expertise in electronic publishing with other Canadian publishers. We are already discussing issues surrounding the legal depositing and archiving of electronic publications with the National Library. The systems for depositing electronic journals are in their infancy. National libraries around the world are confronting the issue of making these archival electronic publications available for the next hundred years. There is no cheap, easy solution, except perhaps to download the electronic file onto paper! Without publishers and librarians, who will ensure that scholarly research is recorded and stored for posterity?

Conclusion

The various steps that take STM information from the scientist and prepare it for sharing around the world have costs attached to them. Changing the format may change the cost structure but is unlikely to reduce costs significantly. It is more likely to transfer the costs from the publisher to the institutions of the author and reader. This implies that the large prolific research institutions will carry a much greater share of the cost of scholarly communication than the teaching institutions, where the readers are primarily located. Will the investment by research institutions in the information infrastructure become greater and be made at the expense of the library budget? If the economic infrastructure for scholarly communication is destroyed, the vehicles of communication will be eliminated. The not-for-profit publishers will be among the first to disappear. Will the individual disciplines be well served if the various societies can no longer afford to sponsor publication?

References

Bantz, D. (1996, December). Full cost of information technology. AAHESGIT Newsgroup.

Brandao, C. (1996, Winter). Rewiring the ivory tower (Putting scholarly journals online) [Special issue]. Canadian Business Technology, pp. 61-64.

Harter, S. P., & Kim, H. J. (1996, September). Accessing electronic journals and other E-publications: An empirical study. College and Research Libraries, 57(5), 440-456.

Ito, K. (1996). Letter to the Editor. Nature, 382(6593), 666.

Lederburg, J. (1996, February). Options for the future. In D. Shaw & H. Moore (Eds.), Electronic publishing in science: Proceedings of the Joint ICSU Press /UNESCO Expert Conference (pp. 122-126). Paris: UNESCO and International Council of Scientific Unions.

Lustig, H. (1996). The finances of electronic publishing. APS News [Supplement], 5(10), 2.

Okerson, A. S., & O'Donnell, J. J. (Eds.). (1995). Scholarly journals at the crossroads: A subversive proposal for electronic publishing. Washington: Association of Research Libraries.