It’s certainly a wonderful pleasure to be here. I have to admit I was a little intimidated when I realized I was following President Atkinson and even more so, when on the advice of the introducer of the whole symposium, she said to look up the biographies of the speakers and I was amazed to see that he has a mountain in Antarctica named after him. Up until that moment, I had always been extremely proud that I had an insect named after me. I was always grateful it wasn’t a parasite.Let me tell you the perspective that I’m going to try to give you today. I’m a user of scientific information. I teach, I use it in my research, and in the research of my graduate students. I’m a producer of scientific information, through my research and through the research of my lab. But, in a way, I’m also a purveyor of scientific information in that for twenty-two years, I edited the "Annual Review of Entomology," and was involved in various stages from the idea of when we started talking about Web pages until today, when we actually have full online and print issues. So, the first point I want to make is that I’m trying to talk to you from these perspectives. The second point is that I’m trying to talk to you from the perspective of someone involved in scientific journals. Lisa Brawley, the second speaker, will talk about it from the humanities perspective, which as I’m sure you are all aware, is really quite different. What I’ve done is try to organize the talk around trends and perceptions that I see scientists are having, and what this transition and the alternative models to scholarly publication are doing for us.
The first point I would like to make is that scientists have developed an increasing sophistication in the economics of scholarly publishing, which is something that none of us would have even been aware of several years ago. But, we have become much more aware of how this works because of library budget cuts. We have figures such as costs per use, we know subscription costs, and we know just from looking at the non-profit journals with the profit journals If you look at this first trend of how scientists are becoming more aware and President Atkinson’s remark about the rise in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s of commercial publishers, you can see that about forty percent of the scientific journals that we get are commercial journals, with the remaining ones being divided among scientific societies and various other non-profits. The cost for subscribers is about nine times per page as great for for-profit journals as it is for non-profits, something that scientists have also become increasingly aware of.
What I want to do is give you three scenarios of how scientific societies work with their journals. These are all non-profit journals The first scenario is the ma and pa grocery store-equivalent of journals. What I’ve used as an example is a small society, about two thousand five hundred members, which produces one journal. The journal that I’m specifically talking about, one that a lot of you have never heard of, is the "Journal of the North America Bentological Society." I've chosen this journal because it has made the information available about just where its expenses go. In this society, volunteers do a tremendous amount of editorial work. About eighty-three percent of their budget for their journal goes entirely for printing costs. Now, figures like this have made scientists very aware of a perception that if we switch from print to electronic publishing, there is no reason that the costs should stay so high. Even a journal such as "Science" talks about editing versus printing at about a 50/50 split. So, for these small journals there are very definitely this perception those costs will decrease.
Now, let’s go to a little larger type of journal, a mid-society of about seven thousand five hundred or five thousand members that might produce three or four journals. What I’ll take as an example is the Entomological Society of America because they also talk about their costs very effectively. They produce four to five journals, have some permanent staff, and some money is given to editorial assistance. If we look at one of their journals in terms of where the money goes--this is the "Journal of Economic Entomology," we see that over 50% really goes for printing, distribution and composing costs, and that editing comprises about one-quarter. Figures such as these are being talked about by entomologists and by people in a variety of fields. There is a perception among scientists that there will be cost savings as this process develops.
It’s interesting to look at where the income comes for this particular journal.
Library subscriptions make up over half, and members' subscriptions are a small percentage. Those of you who are not in science might be wondering what I have about page charges. Page charges are something that we do from our grants, in other words, we subsidize the cost of publication by paying somewhere between $50-$100 for printed pages, so ultimately this is a subsidy that the government gives in terms of scientific publishing which is why journals that are subsidized by page charges have much lower subscription costs. Reprints make up about ten percent of the cost of these.
Let’s go to very large societies such as the American Chemical Society. Now, here we have fifteen thousand to twenty thousand members, and they produce ten or more journals. They are actually a little cagier with their figures. They say that seventy to eighty percent of the cost of operating the journal is to produce the first copy, so that’s the term they use. It’s interesting to look the American Chemical Society because they admit that a lot of their revenue from operating their journals is really what operates all of the activities of their society. Even the Entomological Society of America, in terms of their income from the "Journal of Economic Entomology," points out that sixty-five percent of their income from the journal goes to publishing; the remaining thirty-five percent goes to operating costs of their society. So again the perception among most scientists is that we are paying a lot for journals, the printing costs are going down, and you’re telling us in advance that you are using this to run the operations of the society. It would make intuitive sense that with this transition, we are going to start finding costs going down.
Now, when we talk about university presses, we’re really talking about almost the same thing. They range from the ma and pop types of university press, such as the Duquesne Press, to the extremely large ones such as UC Press. If you look at the figures I have for the non-profits--these figures really are a little hard to come by, but they’re probably true based on talking to people off the record-- about ninety percent of their income comes from library subscriptions. A very, very small percent comes from personal subscriptions, and certainly none or very rarely from page charges, and then maybe a certain percentage from royalties. The real onus has shifted from page charges and personal subscriptions to libraries to pick up the costs of these commercial publishers.
The second thing that is a very definite trend is that there are a lot of things that are going on with the advent of the transition from print-only to electronic publishing that are creating a new market. For instance, the library subscription rate for "Annual Review" in general, for which we have about over thirty different volumes, was doubled. You can imagine this was extremely unpopular. The reason for this was quite simple. The projection was that as soon as Annual Review was available online, we would lose about fifty percent of our personal subscriptions. The way to make that up was simply to double the cost of library subscriptions. Now in a way, the Annual Review is probably unfairly gone after because our cost per use of most annual reviews is less than one dollar, so it is really quite a bargain, and perhaps should not have received all that criticism. Beth Weil, Head of the UCB BioSciences and Natural Resources Library, has compiled use statistics for this. In any event, it does show that there are all types of things going on.
What we have done to our personal subscriptions is even fancier or glitzier. If you subscribe to one print volume, we will give you online access to thirty-six other volumes for free. What we are doing is giving you online access to thirty-seven journals, and we’ll throw in a print volume for free. The idea is to make this seem much more appealing.
One of the things that I definitely think is a perception is that dissemination of information will become more rapid. I recently published a short paper on an online journal and was amazed that within a day, I was getting comments from people. People were hitting it on hyperlinks. It was really fascinating, and a far quicker response than I’d ever seen in a print journal. The one thing to remember is that although the lag time between submission and publication will be reduced--and it is likely when it really becomes efficient, it will be reduced by two-thirds--there will always be the delays of reviews, the delays of revisions, and the delays of getting things back. The representative from Los Alamos can talk about this as well. There is still going to be the natural inertia and tendency of scientists to sit on things a long time and it’s not going to speed up the process all that much. But again, I do want to emphasize, as we’ll hear from Los Alamos, that once articles are accepted for publication, all fields will start putting them on servers and they will get circulated. This really changes quite a bit of our understanding of release dates. Rapid dissemination is absolutely tremendous.
It’s clear to scientists that what we get from electronic journals compared to what we’ve gotten from print journals is absolutely amazing. The whole idea of value-added features has been discussed in detail. Let me review some of them for you. In "New Astronomy," you can see a model of stars exploding. In the "Journal of Image and Guided Surgery," your kids can do spinal operations if you want to convince them they should be surgeons. There are virtual coffee breaks on gene combos. One of the best is in the "Journal of Biological Chemistry," where you can usually go in and look at the structure of genes. These are really fabulous innovations that we see going on, and I think they are only the beginning.
The value of hyperlinks is clear to all of us. Mike Keller from HighWire, who is going to speak this morning, can talk what HighWire is doing for things that appear in their own journals.
Chat rooms have been very widely discussed, but surprisingly not very widely initiated. Every time they are brought up, people say they really should filter some of the comments in some of the articles that people want to send in and get rid of some of the vituperative remarks. We all hear about how the rudeness of email has affected our lives. I think this is probably one of the things that we are going to see as well.
One of the things we did with articles for "Annual Review of Entomology" was to put out right in the beginning the availability of Web sites for additional material. Entomologists are always interested in mating--cricket mating, for example. Actually, the insects are very interested in it, so entomologists always tend to write about it. What we have been able to do is to have not only a set of color photographs, which would have been just impossible due to the publication costs, but we’ve actually had clips of cricket mating and the sounds that crickets make. If you think of what this does in terms of teaching, it’s really a whole new world for how communication is done. I think this is one of the things that has absolutely changed how we think about communication.
There’s a controversy that’s been talked about quite a bit at Berkeley, which is this idea of prestige and whether journals that are published by commercial publishers are less prestigious than those produced by non-commercial publishers. Take, for instance, impact factors. We make fun of them, but this month’s "Science Watch" uses impact factors to rank the national universities. Berkeley is listed at seven, and Stanford is ranked at second, which will certainly make someone in the audience happier, I think. The prestige of journals and the prestige of where we publish permeate at least some sciences. I have had it suggested that perhaps biologists are a little more concerned about this—the physics envy type of approach. I think this is a very valid point to think about. An issue that was brought out in math and physics was that journals that are produced by for-profit publishers are really of a lower quality. When you look at it, you can find that there are very good journals that are produced by the non-profits and very good journals that are produced by the for-profits. The question is would a scientist choose not to send an article to a for-profit journal because it has a high library subscription rate? I think probably not. Librarians started a movement, one that could be viewed as price fixing that made us more aware of this. It’s probably something that could change, but I think right now, the perception among scientists is that they want to go for the best journal for the best audience. Whether or not the library is paying a lot for the subscription has not entered into the choice of where we publish yet.
To finish up, there really are three driving forces that I think are pushing what we are doing in scientific publishing. The first of these is that the technology is advancing tremendously in terms of all the value added features we can have. The second is that we are still publishing and perishing. The scientific output is still increasing, it has not gone down and, at least among colleagues of my age, there are no signs that it is decreasing. Younger ones talk about how the whole system will change, especially seeing what’s gone on in physics with the vast number of authors. Interestingly, the first paper that was published on the human geno project was really a very, very short note in "Nature" that had more co-authors than humans have chromosomes. The third one is that library funding is not keeping pace with what’s going on.
I don’t think it is true that publishers are simply responding to academic demands. It is pretty common for commercial publishers to solicit many of us to start. It’s always an ego stroke to be asked to do this, but I think it’s really creating a market for them. If you think about it, certainly in scientific journals, what other field would you have somebody else paying to do the research, someone else paying for you to write it, you give it to them and maybe even pay page charges, they publish it and sell it, and then, if you want to use it a second time, you have to pay them for royalties. It’s really a crazy system.
I just want to conclude with these last four points. The one thing that we have to remember is that nobody reads scientific articles with the intensity that graduate students read them. They’re the ones that can tell you the nook and cranny of everything you said, find that contradiction, and remember the details of what any of us has written. The problem is that they’re ready for everything we can give them. They love the technology. We did through Annual Reviews some user surveys and found that graduates prefer reading online. They actually like all of the benefits that this offers, compared to those of us who are over fifty and prefer to carry books around. The contrary thing is that the decisions that are being made about how we advance technologically are really being made by people my age, people in their fifties who have been around for a long time, and who grew up, as President Atkinson said, with a Gutenberg approach to scientific publishing. What we are all going to have to face in the future is that the producers are setting the pace for the rate of change because the consumers are ready to use a tremendous amount more than what we are ready to give them at this point.
In your conference packet, there is a questionnaire prepared by Leon Tsao, who’s at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He’s coming to Berkeley this spring to teach systems communication and information science in the School of Business.
I would really appreciate it if you would take five minutes to fill out the questionnaire to give him an idea of where we’re going. To save postage he’s asked that you send it back to me in the stamped self-address envelope. I’m going to pass them out for him.
It’s been a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.