Death of the Journal - will it be replaced by document delivery?


By Tony Barry and Dr Joanna Richardson
Paper presented to the CAUSE in Australasia Conference '97, Melbourne, April 1997

Abstract

After 300 years, changes in technology threaten the continued existence of the academic journal in its present form. In part this is for economic reasons. For almost two decades the cost of journals has increased faster than the underlying inflation rate which has led to the erosion of individual subscriptions and is now resulting in waves of institutional cancellations by libraries. The high establishment cost of journals means that this process is accelerating. At the same time the emergence of the internet as a publishing and distribution medium has provided a cheaper alternative to paper distribution. The threats to the journal come from a number of quarters:
The model which appears to be emerging is one of article level delivery and the paper will explore these themes in greater depth. [Note: The latest version of this paper may be found at Death of the Journal]


Introduction

The journal format is a consequence of the technology used - that of printing. It is more economic to print and distribute an aggregation of material than individual papers. The advent of the internet is altering the technological equation so that the option of delivering at the article level looks increasingly attractive. In the explosion of new technologies and experimentation associated with the internet a range of services is starting up which provide direct network delivery at the article level and potentially bypass the journals. Which of these alternatives, described below, will be successful in the long term is as yet unclear. What is clear is that for the first time in 300 years, the academic journal, in its present form, is under threat as a principal component of scholarly communication.

At an institutional level the economics of access to journal type material may change significantly. While historically subscriptions by individuals were important for access to journal information, in later years gradual differential cost inflation has resulted in most of the copies on a campus either being subscribed to institutionally by the library or held by those institutions who were fortunate enough to have members of editorial boards on their faculty. This has particularly been the case in science. The institutional subscriptions have been placed on the basis of expressed need; therefore any evaluation of the success of such subscriptions has been notoriously difficult as has been any measurement of usage. As a result justification for journal purchase has been "implied".

The advent of services which supply articles on an individual basis has an associated corollary: for the first time reasonably accurate usage figures are obtainable which can be compared with the cost of subscription,binding and housing. Particularly in the case of small and growing institutions without a large base of subscriptions, this will open up interesting new management opportunities with selection decisions being made on the basis of measured, rather than expressed, demand.

The types of experimental services include:

These are explored further below.

Electronic Journals

Steven Harnad in his writings has proposed that electronic journals will provide a far more effective way to disseminate scholarly output as the formal mechanisms provided via existing scholarly publishers will not be required. An archive of his writings is mounted at Princeton.

While there has been considerable argument about the economics of electronic journals there continues to be an explosion in their numbers as can be seen on the NewJour site, which reports on each new title and changes in titles.

Hartner has reported that thus far these journals are still making little impact on the behaviour of scholars as evidenced in their citation behaviour. Most electronic journals are small and new, so there is not a great base of published literature to cite.Since they are not yet well accepted, very few are indexed byte scholarly abstracting and indexing services. Therefore they are slow to achieve status as attractive vehicles for publications. Index Morganagusattempts to address this constraint. It uses Harvest as the technology to provide a searchable, full-text index of 34 library-related electronic serials.

However, as long as academic promotions continue to be driven by the quantity of publications and by their quality, i.e. publication in prestigious journals, journals in a new medium will have difficulty attracting quality papers of high impact. CICNet at its Web Site has endeavoured to keep track of those which are academically useful.


Document delivery services

A number of institutions are now offering document delivery services for material at article level, specifically from journals; many offer direct delivery to end users. Typically such a service is provided via a database generated from the tables of contents of the journals covered. Some of these are publisher based, some like Blackwell's Navigator project are based on traditional booksellers. These databases may be searched and an article requested. The Uncover service is the most mature of these services. Users are prompted for a fax number and a credit card number; the article is then delivered via fax within 24 hours or,for some material, within one hour. The service intends to shift to email delivery in the near future. Costs vary because of copyright. This however gives them an advantage over libraries trying to offer more than a traditional Inter-Library Loan service.

Certainly the scheduled release in early 1997 of a web-based interface to Knight-Ridder Information's DIALOG service will create considerable interest among libraries. It is anticipated that DIALOG Web will be able to be used in combination with DIALOG ERA, a copyright compliance feature, for e-mail redistribution of search results. There will also be a link to the KRSourceOne document delivery service for ordering of documents when the fulltext is not available online.

However, here in Australia the wider deployment of the REDD scheme started by a cooperative group of Queensland university libraries, or the international JEDDS scheme funded by the National Priority(Reserve) Fund Library Projects, may have difficulty in expanding to end user delivery if the developments in copyright law limit fair dealing by libraries. The JEDDS scheme, based as it is on the fairly successful Ariel workstation software produced by the Research Libraries Group,envisages email delivery of documents ultimately direct to end users.

The "grey" literature


There has been a steady growth in publishing preprints, reprints, conference papers and similar material directly on the net. This has been done through:

Impressionistic evidence is that the use of these servers is quite heavy and possibly even greater than the usage of the final printed form of the document.

Publishers

Traditional publishers are now starting to enter this area in a big way. Publishers such as Academic Press, Johns Hopkins Press with Project Muse , and Elsevier are now offering servers which will give access to major back runs of their journals. Faxon provides a service which links to most publishers' web sites . There is still a great deal of uncertainty in this area and the costing is unattractive. Most publishers are offering access at a price higher than the print equivalent. Such services could well be very attractive to small geographically dispersed institutions lacking major existing holding of the print literature. The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has recently established major deals with DEETYA funds to access full text of journals from Academic Press and Information Access Corporation (IAC). This is part of CAUL's program to provide access to significant datasets across the internet providers.

The difficulty publishers face is the need to maintain a revenue stream still based predominantly on print sales, while at the same time undertaking costly developments in the electronic area. It may take some time before stable patterns for charging appear.


Professional bodies

The scholarly societies are very active in this area. The American Mathematical Society has transferred their entire historical collection of published material and integrated it with their Mathematical Reviews database so that the entire set can be searched and papers delivered directly from the search to the desktop . The Institute of Physics also provides direct access to electronic forms of their journals to those institutions which subscribe to the paper copies. Societies are also integrating access to their publications with access to other services they provide to members via a single site on the network. The University of Waterloo's Scholarly Societies Project provides links to work in this area.

The societies, lacking a profit motive and existing to give benefit to their members, have provided a lead in this area.


Gateways

A number of vendors are looking at the provision of various kinds of gateways which can link traditional article level indexing tools to document delivery services. The kind of service which will be successful here is still uncertain .The UK arm of the Blackwells group through its new Navigator service has a particularly interesting product whereby they are attempting to fulfil the traditional bookseller role as a serial agent, i.e. that of providing simplified access to the variety of service available from publishers. As a major bookseller with a great deal of experience in the market and US experience with the Uncover project, their service offerings are likely to be significant. However, not a great deal of content was available from them at the time of writing. In like manner Swets Subscription Service in the Netherlands has its prototype SwetsNet service.


Conclusions

It is clear that this is a difficult time of transition. Library budgets continue to be under pressure and serials make up 20-25% of their expenditure. The prices of serials have been increasing faster than budgets for the last 20 years. In science most are priced beyond the range of individual subscribers; therefore publishers rely on revenue from research libraries instead. In addition serials are labour intensive. The collision between a major shift in the technology of delivery and high subscription costs foreshadows that there may be a fairly rapid shift to the use of article level services instead of individual subscription, particularly by those most affected, i.e. the newer and smaller tertiary institutions which do not own long established collections to fall back upon.

If article level delivery becomes the predominant form of delivery the need for the journal format as other than an accrediting and labelling scheme may come into question. Direct delivery from publisher to reader, thereby bypassing the library, is also a possibility if some of the more optimistic predictions of long term costs of electronic publishing prove to be true or if there is a shift of publishing costs to the author's institution in the form of a publishing subsidy, as some have proposed. It is after all in the interests of both the author and the home institution to promote wide dissemination of the results of university scholarship and research. Provided problems of accreditation can be solved easily, electronic publishing by a university of the work of its scholars might prove to be a useful marketing tool to attract students and research funds.

In the shorter term it is likely that university libraries will be faced with making more complex deals to access material across the network, leading to further and deeper interaction with computing support and network support areas. Some of these arrangements will be "package deals", providing attractively priced access to a publisher's entire output, even though some of the content may not fit the profile of the university. Multi-institutional purchasing is also likely to increase as evidenced by the apparent success of the CAUL initiatives mentioned earlier.

Whatever happens, it would seem that more information will be available to the user at the desktop; however considerable organisational adjustments may be required in order to deliver the material.

Last updated Sun, 23 Mar 1997