I was asked to do a few observations before I turn the floor over to Paul and to Bill.Since I published the scholarly sublishing book in 1996 I am refreshed to see that we are definitely in a state of movement more than we were in 1995 when we did the work. One of the issues that we're facing is what are we going to do about the younger generation. For those of you who remember the Flower Drum Song, there was a lovely song between the two generations about how they didn't understand each other. Technological innovations have always caused generational divides. Electricity, phones, television, were all once magical. And, of course to those of us not living in the advanced western world, they still are. But they're not magical today; we take them for granted. We don't turn on the electricity and fear for atoms to come down and destroy our brains the way the previous generations did.
The computers and the Internet form an interesting generational divide because the gap is closing more rapidly than we've seen with previous technological advances. There are a few hold-outs in the academic community, of course, and they probably don't use ATM machines either. Fortunately, they are going away. It's easy to stereotype the generation-x but they're certainly changing the landscape. From what I can tell thus far on the west coast, you're experiencing the same problems we are on the east coast.
The port for every pillow, if you don't have it wired through your OPAC, students will look you over for another institution. And that's certainly describing us in New England.
And that is changing the academic landscape in New England as well. Yet this wired generation has little direct influence over the nature of scholarly communication.
So we're torn between two paradigms, but I think that is a generational issue. It's about the way we have done things and the way we can or could do things.
The publishers are keeping the paper issue alive more than the user base. What we don't know about the socialized behavior of this wired generation is to what degree the behavior that they learned from the other generation will translate into their practices as they advance in the academic community. The mere use of a computer does not a new paradigm make. And lets face it. You can use a computer to do essentially the same thing you did in the pre-computer age. When my students turn in papers to me, they're very pretty and they have lovely fonts and lovely tables, but they still reflect pretty much the same format that they did prior to the computer.
The controllers of the process still rule and those that seek the rewards follow those rules. Having just gone through and survived the tenure process, I know how much those rules mean. One's cautious when one has spent four years of one's life in a Ph.D program and six years getting tenure that you satisfy what the rule-makers seek. There are universities that are trying to get away and incorporating a teaching model saying that you could teach and this should be very important to the tenure process. And I happen to know of a colleague at that juncture who is taking that to heart. And we all think they're committing suicide.
To what extent will those following these rules influence the considerations of future researchers is really unknown at this point. We find in some interesting paradigms of post-modern populism, which have been discussed just briefly by previous speakers, that those that are visited the most are best.
But we're experiencing pressures on the system. We have a graying, retiring faculty. If you follow the "Chronicle of Higher Education" at all you will be aware that many members of the current faculty will be gone. We have a lop-sided demographic in the academic (?). For example, on my faculty of 14, half will be gone in eight years. There's a friend of mine at the University of Massachusetts-Boston in the Math Department, that's 11 members. And she's the baby of the department at 54.
Distance education is, of course, playing a significant role in pressuring the system and we have to do that if distance education is truly going to be legitimate. The resources that must be available for people who are in distance education situations must be equal to that which would be on campus. If you have to start changing assignments in order to satisfy this requirement, then you're relegating distance education to a possible second class education; something that those of us who are looking at this, or working with this area, are profoundly aware of.
The questions about the role of research, as was discussed in previous sessions, are coming more and more into play. We're seeing that more on the east coast today with administrators, such as your President and HighWire projects, who are taking an avid interest in these line item budgets -- something they did not do five years ago.
And, as a matter of fact, I found myself in a couple of circumstances recently where I found high-level university administrators quoting chapter and verse my first chapter of the book. I took this as some profound piece of information that they had just realized - duh- we already paid for this.
I've already mentioned that tenure is coming under fire in certain camps across the United States. I still say I believe tenure will survive as teaching takes on a more dominant role. Will electronic publications be seriously considered? You can say to an academician that these things are going to count. But it will be if they really do count. We don't have a track record for this and it takes a long time for these trust variables to be established. Just saying it is not going to change people's behaviors in your work. You have to see people actually survive it and get through it and survive before people will change from the paradigms that they already know.
The big change in the promotion and tenure process was at Harvard. They have now gone to where only five publications can be submitted for promotion or tenure. It'd have to be your top five publications. Many universities are looking at this model very closely as a possible shift in how we will be dealing with the process in the future away from the long laundry list of publications that we've generated in the past.
Also, when scholarly publishing came out, there were not many parallel published journals available, meaning those that were in print coming online electronically. I have taken several positions on this, i.e., whether or not it has been good or bad. For those of you that work with these electronic journals put out by the Evil Reed and other publications, we have issues with them. Many of them are in pdf, which presents some problems. But it also presents an opportunity to make things sort of nudged in. It looks just like the print. I can take it this way. It looks the old way. It comes to my desk top and is familiar. It's not something that's new, that's novel. And professors are starting to demand that, probably out here as much as on the east coast. There's a great competition going on and stresses going on in the library communities where they'll say, "Look we can now get these things on your desktop," and professors saying but they can get full text down the road and the library's saying "We're working on it; we're working on it."
But what they want is that same look and feel. It's familiar. I'm talking about the older members of the faculty. But it also changes paper as we eventually, and hopefully, that's the concern I have - I'm not sure that the traditional publishers have a vista in their minds beyond just static pdf. We see some examples but it's still very very static and looks very much the same.
And it could stop there. This could be the limits of their vision, for better or for worse, because I think that that's going to be the dividing line. What becomes the authoritative copy when you have an electronic environment, particularly if you jump away from the static publications that author does in three dimensional virtual reality model in their paper. On the paper version, do they have to do a screen shot from multiple angles to adequately depict this virtual reality? Who's responsible for that virtual reality? Do we have to send it back for peer review if, in fact, that model has to be brought out? I'm on the Editorial Board for the "Journal of the American Society for Information Science" and these issues are plaguing us because we don't know what rule to establish regarding these multi-media elements which can be incorporated into the works to be published.
As Lisa pointed out, we're always very concerned about how people are actually using information. Before we had electronics, we had citations, which has provided us one way of determining if something's been used. But if I use something in my class, I might have this accessed three hundred times over the course of its life but it's never been cited and we've never had the ability to track them. On the other hand, now we'll be able to find out not only was it not cited, but it's really never read.
It won't be hypothetical anymore. You'll be able to point to the fact. It's one thing to have a journal to come out and go into the annals and you never know what happens to it. But now, how do we show this to people? Well? You know- this article, all these articles -no one ever read them.
No one every read them. And what does that do to the author? There are fascinating implications regarding evaluation for rank for promotion and tenure. What if you have authors who have had work that was very rarely ever accessed at all?
Finally, in web time and in real time I think that web time gives us somewhat of a warped view of the world. Things seem to happen really fast in web time, and certainly they have the past three years since 1995. It's certainly demonstrated that. But that doesn't mean that people-based systems can change as fast as what we can do electronically. One problem that I see as an obstacle is how scholars work. Many scholars work at home, academia being one of the most fantastic telecommuting opportunities that's ever created. And they're working on older equipment because they're not upgrading their equipment as frequently. They're coming in on 28.8 dial-ins, they have no tech support at home. Things like pdf you have a greater obstacle for them than if they'd be on their home Campuses. These are presenting some real problems that are very different from those like myself who live life out with ATM, Ethernets, networks screaming, 21" monitors, 400 mhz. The text is huge. The computer's enormous. I call it Godzilla. I don't have a desk left. The monitor weighs 80 pounds. I can see beautifully.
But when I talk to other people, these downloading pdf files, or other things, become extremely cumbersome and that is a lopsided obstacle that is not going to change unless we start buying computers with fancy access for where people are actually going to work. That will change in the future but it might not change right now. In that sense, I think we have two different paradigms. I think it's outstanding that we have these projects that are going ahead and showing us the model for the future and what we can do and that they work. That they must work and they must work well. With this other population it's going to be nudging and pushing because they don't react well to each other within the academic community. I have found, working with academicians over the years that many of them resent being shoved at. In my older population of the faculty, to say or even suggest canceling print journals..no you can't do that. But they're going away. They are going away. And so, we're going to be working with a balance between these two paradigms and what we're going to do with the other generation depending on where you are within the paradigm.
With that, I'd like to turn the floor over to Bill Arms who's going to talk about the work of the ACM.