By Barbra Buckner Higginbotham
Library & Academic Information Technologies

To date, the speed with which disciplines have adopted electronic publishing has occurred in direct proportion to the importance each attaches to journal literature versus monographs. The sciences have been first in line, followed by the social sciences; thus far, the humanities are a distant third, both because of its fields' low ratio of journals to books, and generally lower subscription rates.

Certainly a core of print journals will continue to exist in all disciplines; these will be the most popular titles, the ones that continue to make money for their publishers through subscriptions to paper formats, which give better copyright protection. Today, about a hundred electronic or "e-journals" and newsletters exist, but only a handful of these are scholarly refereed or edited publications. For the present, print journals more than dominate the market; a few of these have parallel electronic versions, chiefly on CDROM. Nonetheless, the e-journal is gaining strength and presence in the periodicals marketplace.

A number of factors may continue to keep the course toward electronic publishing careful and slow. There is considerable uncertainty about what to charge for electronic journals, accompanied by fears that uncontrollable copying will cause profit losses. A general lack of user-friendliness and problems distributing non-text also inhibit the growth of the e-journal.

Nonetheless, over the next two to three years, many publishers will take the plunge into electronic publishing, pulled along by the declining purchasing power of libraries and seeking to meet their needs in more cost-efficient ways. Full-text electronic journals will be available either free or for-fee via national networks, or on tape, for mounting locally or regionally. The number of juried electronic journals, though still small compared to the universe of serial literature, will grow.

Some futurists have suggested that the electronic journal will revolutionize the entire process of scholarly communication. In the present academic cycle, scholars conduct research, supported by the universities that employ them or perhaps the federal government; they then give their findings to commercially published journals, so that their institutions can buy them back, at enormous additional costs. Some believe that this process is nearing the end of its life, that before long academic libraries will no longer repurchase the results of institutional research. Instead, today's expensive juried periodical may be replaced by a global and highly interactive process in which papers are floated on electronic networks, critiqued by other scholars using the net, revised accordingly, and perhaps only in some perfected form committed to paper or electronic permanency.

The Appeal of the E-Journal

Speed of Publication: It is chiefly speed of publication that makes the electronic journal appealing to its readers. An article appearing in a print journal within six months of its completion is considered "fast-track"; as papers queue for peer review and editing, publishing delays mount, until an article takes as long or longer than a book to reach its public. For these reasons, more rapid electronic publishing may have appeal for researchers hungry for the latest ideas.

Speed of Access and Delivery: Electronic publications will always be "on the shelf," available when the reader wants them; they will never be stolen or mutilated. They will also be available without the necessity of a trip to the library, if the reader has the proper equipment in his or her home or office. There will be many delivery options: on-the-spot downloading; overnight delivery to an e-mail account; or, telefacsimile.

Flexibility: In the electronic environment journal articles and perhaps even book chapters have been "unbundled"' from the parent publication and are available individually, leaving the reader free to capture as much or as little information as he or she wishes. There will also be enormous flexibility in the ways faculty and students can work with the material they retrieve. Readers will take advantage of the new digital formats to manipulate and analyze (as well as read) the electronic journal, perhaps merging downloaded and local information.

The E-Journal: Unanswered Questions

Among the barriers electronic publications must overcome are the absence of a large installed-base of equipment suitable for taking full advantage of electronic formats, and the costliness of converting printed text or word processing documents into forms appropriate for electronic publishing and retrieval. There are also many questions about electronic journals that need to be explored, before these new formats can make significant inroads in academia.

How Will the Electronic journal be Used? One publisher already experimenting with electronic journals acknowledges that the push for this format is coming from libraries (hoping for economic relief), not from the researchers who read the journals, and that very little is known about how the e-journal will be used or how the reader and the e-journal will interact. For instance, readers may well find it irritating to read or to browse the e-journal onscreen.

Once the electronic journal makes serious gains in academic libraries, will there still be some demand for print? If so, at what point in the journal's-life? Will researchers want to use electronic articles as they use print today, that is, as whole, discrete information packages, or will they also or instead want the ability to manipulate them, to break them up into smaller parts, to rearrange them, to merge them with other data? These are questions yet to be answered.

Perhaps a more preliminary question is, how will the researcher identify the e-journal to begin with? This can be a daunting task. By and large, these journals are not indexed in conventional sources. There is a directory of electronic journals published by the Association of Research Libraries and available either in print or via the Internet; it is quite helpful, but its use presumes a basic knowledge that electronic journals exist.

Distribution, or How Will the E-journal Be Accessed? Will electronic journals be accessed online and "metered" by their publishers? Mounted on networks like the Internet and offered free of charge? Or sold in tape or CD-ROM format, to be mounted locally or shared regionally by a group of libraries? Right now, each of these approaches is being tested by one publisher or another.

Scholars as Publishers: Whatever the distribution format, the electronic journal may well cause scholars to decide to "take back their rights," or assume control of publishing their own research, cutting out that powerful middleman, the commercial publisher. Presumably, the lower costs associated with electronic publishing could enable this enormous change. Each university (or at least each major university,) could publish its faculty's research in its own e-journals, and make these periodicals available free to other institutions, in return for free access to their journals--a sort of "interlibrary loan" of electronic serials. Smaller colleges and universities, because the research giants would perceive their responsibility to share resources, owing to the value the total system offers, might be granted access to everyone's journals, free of charge.

Some Examples of Contemporary E-Journals: We can obtain clues about the future distribution and publication of the e-journal by examining a handful of titles publishing today. The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research (JIAHR) debuted on November 26,1990; it is a product of the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP) of Virginia Tech. For $30 a year, anyone with Internet access can subscribe to this "electronic only" journal. The print version cost the SCP over $5,000 an issue for printing and distribution; the same costs for the electronic journal are reported to be nearly nothing. "The significance of this enormous advantage," the publisher says, "cannot be overstated."

The belief that scholars and institutions w o purchase a subscription will take the publication more seriously because they have paid for it prompted the Academy of Hospitality Research to offer the journal for a price, rather than gratis. The Academy also wanted to place an electronic journal before the library community in the same way a printed journal is presented-through subscription. There was a third reason as well to charge for access to J IAHR: some members of the Academy disagreed with the popular argument that everything available via. the Internet should be without cost. They feared that a policy of this sort would eventually exclude a certain amount of valuable scholarly material, and perhaps even promote the distribution of less valuable information. In this case, profit is not the publisher's objective.

The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, a joint venture of OCLC and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), can be accessed via OCLC at a cost of $150 per year; this includes a microfiche backfile. Subscribers have several options for obtaining copies of desired articles, including printing them out locally, or having them downloaded or faxed for an additional cost. Unlike J IAHR, Current Clinical Trials has full graphics capability. The publishers do not require institutions to purchase multiple passwords or subscriptions.

OCLC reports that this journal will be indexed in Biosis, and that the National Library of Medicine has been approached about including it in Medline. The publishers feel that the added value of multiple-point access that electronic formats bring will (when coupled with a reasonable subscription price) encourage readers to experiment with e-journals, despite the absence as yet of common search protocols.

It is interesting that the publishers of both the Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research and the Online journal of Current Clinical Trials attempt to do something more than promote and sell their own publications; each has also taken certain steps aimed at establishing the e-journal in the minds of scholars and librarians as a worthwhile method of information delivery to which one subscribes (much as we do to print periodicals) for a fee. It is likely that publishers understand that only a general acceptance of the electronic journal can lead to the development of the critical mass of such publications necessary for real profitability, and that the creation of comforting equivalencies between familiar print journals.. and. new electronic ones will contribute to this acceptance.

Elsevier has mounted TULIP (The University Licensing Program), a project that makes the full text of several dozen materials science journals available to a group of universities as a long-term experiment in determining how journals might be used on a university's electronic network. This licensing approach is quite different from the one taken by the two publishers mentioned above. The purpose of the Elsevier project (which is projected to last for three years) is to give the publisher and librarians hard information about how e-journals and their print equivalents will be used when both are available to the reader: how will network access change the ways in which readers work with journals? Elsevier hopes that the project can also generate information that will suggest appropriate pricing structures.

Protecting the Contents of the E-journal: There are still major questions about how to safeguard the contents of the e-journal from unauthorized modification, misuse, and misappropriation. That very flexibility cited earlier as a source of appeal for the electronic journal becomes a source of concern, when authors and publishers think of the researcher downloading material, then rearranging it, perhaps even incorporating it with local data so that its origins and identity are lost or muffled.

As protection against unauthorized copying, rather than subscribing to journals in the electronic environment libraries may instead license them. Licenses are designed to remunerate publishers for the possibility of wide, unconstrained electronic copying of scholarly materials that could violate the Copyright Act.

Licensing vs. Ownership: Can We Afford the Trade-Offs? The bald truth about most distribution schemes for electronic journals is that commercial firms will own the information in these full-text serials, and scholars and libraries will rent it from them. How much will this cost? How rapidly will costs increase? How easily can we obtain this information if the vendor discontinues the electronic version or we can no longer afford it? How can we be certain By the year 2000 the market for that electronic journals are being journals and print journals may preserved? Suppose publishers decide there is little profit but considerable expense associated with retaining older issues of their journals, and routinely dispose back files? This is not a concern can be easily dismissed or rationalized when information becomes the sole property of the profit-making sector, and we find that we have sacrificed great deal on the alter of powerful searching techniques and instant information delivery.

The Validity of the Electronic journal: The e-journal will be legitimized only when those who presently publish in respected print journals consent to contribute their research to electronic periodicals as well. Will researchers want to publish their results in journals that are infrequently refereed, read by small numbers of persons, and rarely indexed in standard sources? Or will electronic journals struggle with the taint of the vanity press? What weight will tenure committees give to papers that appear in such journals?

For the e-journal to gain a real foothold in the scholarly market, faculty must experience a major shift in values and accept this n4 format as a legitimate vehicle I their scholarship. Scholars value greatly the refereeing and editing processes associated with the journal; perhaps if the means, publishing e-journals is also placed in their hands (rather than being centered in the commercial sector), this new format will make greater gains more quickly as a accepted publishing vehicle.

Textual and Content Limitations: At present, many electronic journals, are distributed as ASCII text files, which severely limits the kind of information they may contain. For example, color, foreign characters, illustrations, and mathematical notations are impossible with this kind of file structure. Publishers have already found the inability to use graphics, initially considered only, a minor handicap, instead to be of considerable importance.

The E-Journal and the Academic Library

By the year 2000 the market for e-journals and print journals may be split 50/50; it is likely that publisher lacking electronic delivery capability will have been forced from the marketplace. The subscription model will continue to lose ground, while the purchase of single articles and the licensing of journals in full-text are likely to grow. Indeed, when we reach the point in time that many journals are published electronically and readers have had almost ten years of "training" in thinking of articles as independent pieces of information rather than individual segments of some other published whole, there is every reason to anticipate the decline of the subscription, with its concept of regularly issued thematic clusters of articles called "journals".

Thus the electronic journals presents many challenges to academic librarians. How will we pay for them? Make readers aware of their existence? Provide easy access to their contents? Ensure the availability of back-files? Master and teach the many different protocols needed to access them? Here at Brooklyn College, we are beginning to grapple with these issues. The answers to these questions will provide ample fodder for future columns.