1. Cornell CS 502 Scholarly Communication Disruption and Transition CS 502 – 20020425 Carl Lagoze – Cornell University

2. Cornell CS 502 “Disruptive Technologies” C.M. Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When new Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvest Business School Press, 1997. Failure of established organizations to adopt and react to new technologies Current success and quality is not a predictor of the future Characteristics of disruptive technologies –Initially underperform established products –Enable new applications for new customers –Performance improves rapidly

3. Cornell CS 502 Encyclopedia Britannica Two centuries of tradition as the most scholarly and complete of English-language encyclopedias Confronted with lower quality but more accessible and cheaper CD-ROM encyclopedias Business model collapsed almost instantly

4. Cornell CS 502 Scholarly Communication vs. Popular Publishing Small, uniform author & reader community Authors and readers often the same Reliance on volunteerism and “community responsibility” Short-term readership interest Diverse and relatively large author & reader community Distinction between authors and readers Money and fame are motivating factors Interest often persists

5. Cornell CS 502 Why do scholars publish? It is the tangible product of our work Our funders expect it – big publication lists always look good on reports It is our responsibility to our colleagues It is good for our egos It is the/a key to tenure, promotion, and hiring

6. Cornell CS 502 In a world ruled by “publish or perish,” what perishes first, it turns out, are trees and library budgets. Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish

7. Cornell CS 502 How the system works funding proposal funding research results paper writing peer review publication promotion tenure notoriety journal submission

8. Cornell CS 502 Who are the role players Scholars –Faculty –Researchers – Commercial, Academic, Government Labs Publishers –“Big” for-profits: Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer-Verlag Learned and Professional Societies –ACM, APS, AMS Publishing operations often subsidize other operations Some are hard to differentiate from for-profit publishers – e.g., IEEE Libraries –In paper system the sole distribution point for publications

9. Cornell CS 502 Scholarly publishing is extremely hierarchical Premier Sources Second Tier Might as well be “People”

10. Cornell CS 502 Issues and Changes Exponentially increasing amount of information produced by scholars Growth in both dimensions –Horizontal Increased specialization New and more specialized journals –Vertical Diminish single source reliance Facilitate multi-uses for single source Compressed time for “relevance” of results, increased demand for rapid delivery

11. Cornell CS 502 Broken Economics

12. Cornell CS 502 Assumptions in current scholarly publishing system Publications are difficult to produce Publications are difficult to distribute Readership is by closed community Archiving and management is by closed community

13. Cornell CS 502 Some “side effects” of the current system Rich get Richer! Global scholarly divide worsens –Research institutions in developing countries can’t afford subscriptions –Intellectual capital flees Hierarchy gets more stratified –Unpublished papers disappear –Entry into the system is difficult

14. Cornell CS 502 Per article costs and revenues Acks. P. Ginsparg

15. Cornell CS 502 Where are the costs in the print system Publishers –Copy-editing –Production –Administration of review system –Production –Distribution Libraries –Cataloging –Preservation –Binding –Shelving

16. Cornell CS 502 What do these economics tell us? Distribution in electronic system is basically free –Fundamental assumption of paper system is eliminated –“Publishing” by everyone should be encouraged and supported Services need to be disambiguated from distribution –Free distribution doesn’t mean that there isn’t an economic model –Systems like review, filtering, awareness can be built on top of a free distribution system

17. Cornell CS 502 Acks. P. Ginsparg

18. Cornell CS 502 What are the implications of this model? A marketplace of ideas People choose appropriate entry points into the system –Troll for free at the lowest layers –Pay for guided entry at upper layers Money can be made for synthesizing information Standards for interchange amongst layers are important (e.g., OAI-PMH)

19. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change - Readers … there’s a sense in which the journal articles prior to the inception of the electronic abstracting and indexing database may as well not exist, because they are so difficult to find. Now that we are starting to see … full-text showing up online, I think we are very shortly going to cross a sort of critical mass boundary where those publications that are not instantly available in full-text will become kind of second-rate in a sense, not because their quality is low, but just because people will prefer the accessibility of things they can get right away. Clifford Lynch 1997

20. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change - Publishers Electronic versions of existing journals Licensing arrangements to libraries –http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/cgi- bin/dj.cgi?section=ejournal&URL=SerialsSearchhttp://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/cgi- bin/dj.cgi?section=ejournal&URL=SerialsSearch Problems –License bundling Inflate costs and maintain economic model Force libraries to subscribe regardless of interest –Longevity dependent on license continuity

21. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change - Publishers Electronic Journals –D-Lib Magazine – http://www.dlib.orghttp://www.dlib.org –Journal of Digital Information (JODI) – http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/jodi/ –Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) – http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ The economic models are no established

22. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change – Publishers and Libraries JSTOR –http://www.jstor.orghttp://www.jstor.org Recognition of reality –Archival journal storage is expensive for libraries Shelf space crisis forces libraries to choose between –Keeping archival issues to serials –Continuing subscriptions for new issues –Building expensive new buildings –Archival copies have limited economic value to publishers Cooperative non-profit model among publishers/foundation (Mellon)/libraries Sliding window to digitize old issues of serials and provide ready access services

23. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change – Libraries & Professional Societies HighWire Press – http://highwire.stanford.eduhttp://highwire.stanford.edu Realities –Many professional societies and journals are “Mom & Pop” operations –Technical and economic cost of electronic publishing is often prohibitively high Solution –Highwire acts as a brokering service to provide electronic publishing technology for small professional societies and journals –Pooling technology allows creation of higher level services (e.g., reference linking amongst journals)

24. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change - Scholars Eprint respositories –Author-self archiving gives scholars control over their intellectual output –Harnad’s “subversive proposal” –Direct descendant of traditional pre-print sharing in print form among scholars Examples –arXiv – http://arxiv.orghttp://arxiv.org –ePrints – http://www.eprints.orghttp://www.eprints.org –California Digital Library scholarly publishing archive - http://repositories.cdlib.org/ http://repositories.cdlib.org/ Related Issues –Publisher agreements – some journals refuse to publish anything that has been posted as an eprint

25. Cornell CS 502 Signs of Change – Computer Scientists Automatic creation of traditional journal services ResearchIndex – http://researchindex.orghttp://researchindex.org –Selective web crawling to gather CS resources –Heuristics and AI techniques to establish services Searching Reference linking Research in automatic reviewing techniques –Collaborative quality filtering http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tracyr/project/ –Scientometrics Paper ranking by citation analysis