In the electronic realm, the pace of academic discourse can be accelerated and the long and often frustrating delays eliminated. At the EJS we have no postal delays. Submitted papers are in the email boxes of reviewers usually a few minutes after I log on to my university account. Sometimes I need to convert the submission to ASCII and this may add a day or two if I don’t have the time to do the conversion immediately. But even this delay is insignificant.
Our board members and reviewers normally take a few days to no longer than two weeks to complete their review. Once I have received their comments in my email box, I have to make my final decision. Again, depending on my work load, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to two weeks. After the decision, I inform the author electronically.
If the paper is accepted, or after the author has completed revisions, the next step is to format, copy edit, and convert it to HTML and ASCII. Without interruptions, this takes about an hour depending on the complexity of the piece. Once this is completed, the article can be sent to the author for a final once over and then placed on the web page. Total time from submission to publication is 7 days to 2 months and in ideal cases, two days is not unreasonable!
Delays enter into the process when the author has to complete revisions to the paper. Since most of our submissions require some sort of revision, these delays are regular occurrences. However, perhaps as a direct result of having had their submissions handled quickly, most authors complete their revisions apace. So, even with this added delay, it is still possible to publish a paper in as little as a month from the time it is first submitted.
(25)Clearly this is a quantum time savings and the benefits are potentially enormous. Harnad (1990) has written extensively about the potentials of the new medium.
Scholarly inquiry in this new medium will proceed much more quickly, interactively, and globally; and it is likely to become a lot more participatory, though perhaps also more depersonalized, with ideas propagating and permuting on the net in directions over which their originators would be unable (and indeed perhaps unwilling) to claim proprietorship. An individual’s compensation for the diminished proprietorship, however, would be the possibility of much greater intellectual productivity in one lifetime, and this is perhaps scholarly skywriting’s greatest reward.
As Harnad suggests, there is a potential to enliven academic debates. Articles published in journals often elicit peer commentary. However this commentary can appear in the journals months after the article was initially published and years after it was initially submitted. In the electronic realm commentary can appear days after the article is published and weeks after it was first submitted. Indeed, direct email links can even be provided from the author’s signature in the article and commentators can easily contact the author directly with comments or requests for information. In it conceivable that global research partnerships could form between those with similar interests with no more effort than that needed to click on the author’s name in the article. From the very start, the EJS has provided automatic mail links to encourage this sort of global networking.
It is further possible to extend the process of commentary and make it more participatory as Harnad suggests. The EJS has installed and is currently testing software that will allow our readers to comment on submissions on-line. Responses will be archived in “forums” assigned to each submission and anyone in the world will be able to review the archived comments. We plan on making this software available for initial public testing in January of 1996.
ACCESS
If you have read through to this point, then you know that electronic publication offers vastly increased access to scholarly material. You are probably reading this from your home or office computer. You have not had to pay a subscription fee for this convenience and you have not had to make a laborious trip to the library. You will also have noted that I have provided hypertext links to almost all of the
in this paper. You are thus easily able to check on the accuracy of my citations and the use to which I put them -or even make copies of them yourself with the local laser printer. Again, no bothersome searching through libraries. You have easy, quick, elegant access to all the material you need to read this article. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
Or does it. From my perspective, it was a joy to research this paper. Most of the material of any consequence to electronic publication is on-line and freely available. All I had to do to gather the material to write this paper was use powerful WWW search engines, follow hypertext links, browse articles, and print the ones that I wanted to use. In the process I expanded my own library of material, stored electronically of course, for future reference. The research process was easy and quick. All in all I probably spent less than 8 hours collecting material. If I had to make multiple trips to our university library, 8 hours would have been consumed in the commute and search for parking space alone.
(30)Ease of access is not the only benefit. There is a potential for expanded institutional and geographic access as well. Currently there are over 90 countries with some access to the Internet and over 25% of these countries have gained access in the last two years (NSF, 1995). New countries which just emerged include Algeria, Armenia, Belarus, Burkina Faso, China, Columbia, Dominican Republic, French Polynesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macau, Morocco, Mozambique, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Philippines, Senegal, Swaziland, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. As noted earlier, the EJS is currently viewed by academics in 39 of these countries. However we should be cautious in interpreting these various statistics. It remains an empirical question whether or not internet access is leading to expanded academic access in these countries. Still, the fact that any institution with an internet connection can have access to the EJS without cost bodes well for the expansion of access to academic material.
OBSTACLES
Two years ago, probably one of the biggest difficulties associated with publishing in electronic format was the ASCII “barrier.” Perhaps barrier is to strong a word. But anyone who has had to struggle through a document without the benefit of proportional font, enlarged and embolded headings, variable kerning and line spacing, and neatly justified margins knows what a difference even minimal control over formatting can make to the readability of a document. While it is not impossible, it is very difficult to make plain text in a plain monospace font look attractive. [13] Indeed, the usual result of ASCII publication efforts is a cluttered, unappealing, barely legible and often just plain dirty piece of work. As silly as it might sound, convincing someone of the respectability of a publication is difficult when the only example you have is an ASCII document. As Okerson (1994: 11) notes:
Apparently, there are academics, and reputable ones at that, for whom the cost/benefit of the Mercedes Benz — the smart cover, prestigious logo, beautiful paper, and added-value galore — is less important than the means of quick and effective conveyance, even if it be merely a rusty old heap that runs.
Now of course we have the World Wide Web and the associated Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). With its emergence and gradual evolution, the aesthetic appeal of electronic documents has improved a hundredfold. We now have all of the aesthetic benefits of the traditional paper based publication noted above and in addition we are able to incorporate graphic images, sound, and “live” links to cited documents. As noted earlier, some have started to experiment with the potentials of this new media and the results are encouraging (Cuneo, 1995).
Permanence
Despite these welcome advances, there are still a number of problems associated with academic publication on the Internet. These include the permanence, accessibility and credibility (Harrison et. al, 1991) of the publication. In terms of permanence, it is vital that both contributors and readers of electronic publications have the assurance of long term, uninterrupted access. In the past this assurance has been problematic for a number of reasons. In the first place, electronic publication is new and, especially two or more years ago, there was simply no assurance that a new publication would survive very long. In the second place, changes in hardware or server configuration, or institutional moves can change the electronic address of the publication. We at the EJS have experienced this latter difficulty as our computing services department struggles to keep up with an explosive growth in the demand for internet services. This increased demand has necessitated changes in computer operating systems (necessitating changes in the software used to serve HTML documents) and changes in server addresses (as new servers are added to the local area network). The result is temporary downtime and/or reader frustration as there old address no longer functions.
As electronic publication matures, and as specific journals demonstrate their staying power, permanence becomes less of an issue. Even institutional changes are no longer significant obstacles to the perceived permanence of the journal. It is now a simple matter to locate publications by drawing on any one of a number of sophisticated global search engines. [14] In addition, libraries [15] may choose to acquire complete archives of the HTML files and serve them up on their own hardware (Amiran and Unsworth, 1994). This of course requires hardware and computer expertise. But again, as the Internet matures, these commodities are more and more becoming commonplace. An alternative solution to the problem of permanence, and one that the EJS is pursuing because of certain ancillary benefits, [16] is to secure “mirror” sites were complete copies of the journals are kept and updated automatically on a nightly basis. In this way, the EJS is not dependent on one institution and subscribers and contributors can be assured that even if the University of Alberta could no longer provide space for the journal, other sites would still exist. Canada’s McMaster university is one of the first institutions to offer space for such a mirror cite. At this point we are interested in mirror cites in other countries.
Accessibility
(35)Earlier we cited accessibility as one of the key benefits of on-line publication. However there are still unresolved problems – though like permanence, accessibility was more of a problem two years ago than it is today. At the time the EJS was founded, the WWW was new and untried and few academics even knew that it existed. In addition, and partly because the academic content of the WWW was minimal, institutions were slow to provide the needed software to access the WWW and, even when access was available, few took the time to develop the required skills. However with the explosion of academic publications on the internet and the growing recognition of the benefits of electronic publication, more and more institutions are providing full internet access for the student and academic populations and academics are now more motivated to developed the skills needed to surf the web. In addition, technology continues to mature rapidly and more user friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and sophisticated interfaces are constantly being developed (or existing ones enhanced). As a result of this continued development, there is no reason to believe that all academics and students will not eventually learn to use the internet access tools.
Still not everyone has jumped on the WWW bandwagon. For various reasons, some technical, some political, some economic, and some motivational, many still only have access to email. This restricted interface to the internet was the reason that we originally decided to offer the EJS in a WWW version, a Microsoft Word 6.0 RTF [17] file, a windows help file version, and an ASCII version available by Listserv. However a number of design and logistical problems forced us to restrict the number of formats to two. In particular we were concerned about the difficulty of mapping a standard product to too many different formats. Most of this concern arose out of the need to provide a standard reference between versions so that a reference like (Fox, 1995: 7) would direct the reader to the same passage in each version. Unfortunately, we were unable to uncover an easy and systematic procedure to provide this absolutely necessary service for the various formats we experimented with.
Credibility
If permanence and accessibility are largely becoming NOTES in the history of electronic publication, the credibility and acceptability of electronic publication is not. In part this is due to the numerous internet doomsayers who constantly jabber about the “dangers” of the anarchic internet. Crawford, for e.g., seems worried about the very real possibility that some fraud will publish an updated and improved periodic table of the elements on the internet and that this updated table will somehow be accepted by the world at large as the new lingua franca of chemistry. Crawford (1994: 29) also seems concerned about the potential use of the internet for propaganda.
A neo-Marxist crank could create an impressive news bureau and be taken quite as seriously as a major news agency, even if that crank made up the supposed news flashes and wildly misinterpreted events.
The solution to these threats according to Crawford (1994: 29) is to “inculcate caution and healthy skepticism among users of the Internet and other immediate resources: to make them understand that being on-line and apparently up-to date confers no authority or even probability of correctness on the information they see.”
Ya whatever. Crawford’s comments should strike you as remarkably uninformed and paternal. Of course, the type of “crank reporting” that he is referring to goes on all the time in the real world of network journalism not to mention the tabloid newspapers and news programs that now inundate the airwaves. And propaganda? His concerns about neo-marxist cranks seem rather misplaced coming from someone who lives in a country where life is saturated with commercial and political propaganda designed to trap and anesthetize the unwary consumer (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992). And just how stupid and unthinking does he think people are that they would accept an updated periodical table just because it appears on the Internet?
(40)Others (Harnad, 1995) have written more specifically about the quality of academic discussions and publication on the internet. He himself however is not concerned about the potential quality of discussions. Indeed, he seems to spend much of his time trying to convince fellow academics that high quality scholarly publication is possible in the context of an anarchic internet if we only transport the traditional mechanisms of quality control, i.e., peer review, into the electronic realm. As he notes, the problems of credibility and quality often have less to do with the actual quality of the electronic journal, since the editorial and peer review functions of paper based journals can be duplicated more efficiently electronically, and more to do with the cautious streak of most academics, the limitations of computer interfaces, the limited intellectual level of discussion in some parts of the internet, fears about plagiarism, copyright issues, concerns about due credit, and the reluctance of the administration in universities to recognize electronic publication when making tenure and advancement decisions (Harnad, 1990).
None of these obstacles cited by Harnad are insurmountable. Most of them just require time for academe to adjust to the new processes. However there is one area were intervention will probably be required, at that is getting scholarly publication on the internet recognized as a real publication effort for tenure and advancement decisions. [18] Until this is accomplished, it is only reasonable to expect that in the highly competitive world of academe, authors will continue to mail hard copy drafts of their work to paper based journals.
From the perspective of the EJS, this is unfortunate since it places limits on the rate of submissions to the journal and hamstrings the growth of sociology on the internet. It is a problem noted by others (Hugo and Newell, 1994) and has become particularly salient for the EJS since we have started to gather regular statistics [19] on the number of ‘hits’ to the journal. It is now clear that while many read the journal, few contribute.
Of course we can’t blame our readers. Promotion is a serious business. Still, we are confident that like permanence and accessibility, it is only a matter of time before this to becomes a historical footnote in the development of electronic publication. There is no doubt that electronic journals are here to stay and that they will replace or refurbish many of today’s paper journals.
The Grand Information Future
None of the benefits (reduced cost, speed of publication, access, increased functionality through public annotation threads) so far outlined are necessarily radical or revolutionary transformations. According to Bill Readings (1994), they account for nothing more than “prosthetic” extensions to existing forms of academic publication. Yet quantitative change can sometimes lead to qualitative change. This realization, coupled with the rapid rate of change and innovation on the Internet, has prompted some commentators to argue we are witnessing revolutionary changes in the form and content of scholarly communication. Others sound the death knell for traditional publication efforts (Ginsparg, 1994; Odlyzko, 1994) and some even predict and proselytize for the emergence of a new, qualitatively different form of scholarly communication (Harnad, 1991).