From: Willard McCarty <mccarty@phoenix.princeton.edu>
Subject: Cyberjournals
Allow me to draw your attention to an article in today's Globe
and Mail (a Canadian daily newspaper): Stephen Strauss,
"Cyberjournals offer faster, cheaper and fuller research news".
The article dwells on scientific publishing on the Web,
specifically as illustrated by the well-known preprint service
for physics, mathematics, and related fields, at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL, http://xxx.lanl.gov/). For fields in
which the speed of publication is crucial and the focus is on
"results" rather than verbal argumentation -- in Strauss' words,
"Science produces a blunt literature" -- the case seems clear
enough. As Strauss points out, scientific journals are
horrendously expensive; he cites Nuclear Physics B, at $9,909 CAN
for 75 issues/year, and goes on to cite rather amazing figures
about the profit-margin for scientific publishing. Publication in
print is also painfully slow, especially in the highly
competitive fields of the sciences, where a delay of 6 months to
a year is commonly known as the "molasses effect".
Strauss quotes Paul Ginsparg, the theoretical physicist at LANL
whom he credits with setting up the preprint service. Dr.
Ginsparg, Strauss writes, "describes his electronic repository as
the death blow to an exploitative system in which publishers
interpose themselves between the best interests of their
contributors and their readers. 'They [the publishers] get
high-quality content for free and then sell it at a high price
back to those who supply it,' he says." Of course the publishers
who read this will think somewhat differently, and I would
encourage them to speak out. As one publisher I know remarked
last Summer, everyone thinks the middleman can be eliminated, but
everyone has a different idea about who that middleman is. (Some
literary theoreticians have managed to eliminate the author of
primary literature; perhaps the same can be done with authors of
secondary literature.... Many authors have figured out how to
eliminate the reader.)
Clearly publishers play a valuable role. In the humanities
at least they serve, for example, as a certification or filtering
mechanism, and the good ones are crucial to scholarship for the
highly specialized skills in editing, design, and collaboration
that can at times approach co-authorship. We cannot know the
number of academic reputations that have been saved or made by
editors, whose names are lost among the acknowledgements, if even
mentioned. I'm sure that some of us have witnessed such saving
grace at close range. In the world of electronic publishing,
which for us seems regularly to be done entirely by the editor(s)
alone, how much of this skill is available, how much time to
devote to the routine tasks?
The question for us is, of course, the extent to which the
benefits obvious for the sciences apply to the humanities. Our
culturally-driven p-envy of the sciences is always threatening to
put us into the mental straitjacket of imitation, such as the
overemphasis on "results". In humanities computing we sometimes
publish RESULTS as such but sometimes not. My reference book on
Ovid, for example, will be the RESULT of several years' work in
humanities computing, but I certainly would never describe the
contents as RESULTS. Nothing is proved by them; rather, I hope
readers will agree, the basis for a new area of research is
established. If the book consisted of a long argument in prose,
the term RESULTS would be even less appropriate. To a certain
extent in our fields, the clock is ticking -- wait long enough
and someone will, I suppose, "scoop" you -- but the danger of not
being the first to announce some RESULT is hardly as great in
most of our fields. I've always assumed that no one would be
crazy enough to attempt what I am doing, but colleagues
occasionally tell me that competition is real in various areas of
research in the humanities. In other words, the relevance of
electronic publishing has everything to do with how we construct
our scholarly way of life. Faster/cheaper may be the proximate
cause of leaping from print into the cyberjournal, but having
lept one discovers richer complexities. Let us have commentary on
these here.
Willard McCarty, U Toronto <mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996
From: Humanist list