For reasons which I may or may not reveal some day, I'm interested in picking your collective brains about the future of online scientific publishing.
My premises are as follows:
- I do not read printed scientific journals any more – they waste space and are hard to search through when I'm looking for a specific paper, let alone a general concept.
- You probably don't read print journals any more either.
- If you do, neither you nor anyone else will still be reading print journals in, say, 5 years.
- Electronic editions of journals are still not quite as useable as they ought to be for authors or readers.
Those premises themselves may be flawed, and I invite comment and disagreement about them. Do note, however, that premise 4 does not negate premise 3, though addressing that fourth point will alter the timeline of the third premise. What could publishers do to hasten or ease your use of online versions of journals?
Over the next, say, 5 years (where ", say, 5 years" may actually be a larger number of years), what would you want to see scientific publishers do to make their products better and more accessible? I'm interested in insights from journalists, scientists, non-scientists, and anyone who has been frustrated in dealing with any of the general purpose scientific journals (Nature, Science, PLoS whatever, etc.) in print or online.
Open Access advocates are free to go crazy in the comments, but should know that I already agree with you. Aside from my philosophical belief that information wants to be free-as-in-speech, I happen to think that scientific results ought to be as broadly accessible as humanly possible. I wish more journals threw their archives wide open and charged for access to new results, which is what specialists need, but which are more likely to confuse non-specialists. Whether scientific publishers can be brought to see the light is debatable.
Nature is leaping into Web 2.0 with both feet. Does anyone care? A recent letter in Nature pointed out that the reaction to their experiment with "open review" was a bust, and that even high-profile papers in the PLoS journals don't generate many comments. Is that a cultural problem (scientists would rather write their responses up as a peer-reviewed critique) or is it just a modality that people aren't used to? Comment sections on newspaper stories generally fill up, but rarely with thoughtful comments that a journal would necessarily seek, and it may be that scientists and the scientifically interested public are not yet ready to wade into that morass.
One thing I can think of readily is the equivalent of trackbacks, links back to papers (or blogs) which cite a paper, and better links to cited papers when an online version exists. The DOI system exists, journals should use it. That combination would allow readers to construct their own timelines of developing knowledge about a field. It may even be possible to create dynamic navigation tools and ways of visualizing scientific knowledge as it a accumulates.
What am I not thinking of?
- Log in to post comments
To me, it seems like the journal publishers just don't put the emphasis on online publishing that they should. The websites, while somewhat usable, are still in the end organized and structured in the way a hardcopy journal publisher would do it. I think a breakthrough will come when a journal sort of hands itself over to a web design/production group and lets them really run with their ideas for presenting the content.
In my opinion, PLoS One is starting to get there, but they even have a bit to go before the system is as effortless as it needs to be.
One thing that would be nice, and I think you hint at it a bit near the end of your post, would be a site that is able to learn what sort of research you're interested in, and display relevant articles (sort of a "new for you" feature) based on what sort of papers you've read there before.
I also would prefer if the HTML versions of articles were more legible. I don't always want to have to go to the PDF to get a decent looking document.
I agree that the writing is on the wall for print journals and has been for a couple of years. I wouldn't be surprised if your institution library hasn't already canceled a lot of print subs and gone e-only. Believe it or not, the publishers don't always make it cheaper to go e-only because they fear losing faculty print subs.
As for usability, the problem is that a lot of publishers are small societies that don't have a lot of cash to invest in web development & backfile digitization up front.
The solution I would recommend is to use some of the good discovery tools out there that will let you bypass looking at journal websites one by one. It's could be Biological Abstracts, Scopus, Google Scholar, Pubmed, Web of Science (good for interdisciplinary fields) or some other tool. None of them are perfect, ie. Google Scholar leaves out a lot of publishers but won't say which ones, but among them you can be sure of getting good coverage. Lots of them have good RSS & email alert services now too that let you get canned searches delivered to you periodically. Also some of them have really good citation tracking.
Drop by and see the librarian responsible for your area and I'm sure s/he will be able to help you get up and running.
"A recent letter in Nature pointed out that the reaction to their experiment with "open review" was a bust, and that even high-profile papers in the PLoS journals don't generate many comments. Is that a cultural problem (scientists would rather write their responses up as a peer-reviewed critique) or is it just a modality that people aren't used to?"
Credit. Academic scientists don't do anything they don't get academic credit for. If grant review panels and promotion and tenure committees don't take account of an activity, scientists won't engage in it.
The first reference in the most recent paper I've had accepted was dated 1890. On the one hand, I did read it online. On the other hand, it was a scanned copy of the journal.
In many fields, you still have to access work that dates prior to the era of electronic publication. Some of the major publishers have put their back-numbers on line; many have not. Until they or someone else does that, one will have either to read the paper in hard copy, or else do an incomplete job of literature research.
The thing that worries me about open-source journals is permamance. If I publish in an open source journal, and someone in the year 2120 wants to read my work (implausible though that may be), will it be accessible, the way I can still read Chemische Berichte from the 19th century?
As everyone notes, print journals are fading over the horizon as part of a larger digital revolution (which is an immense historical transformation, of course, we're just seeing the first implications).
Seems to me there's some "uneven development" as different disciplinary networks go through this transformation at different rates. In the immediate the major issues, as others have pointed out, seem to be: a) professional networks mostly still reward print publication over digital, especially in the humanities, although the change is beginning; b) permanence and commodification issues are transformed and it'll take time to work these out as well. It's surely annoying when you can't get a database because KU doesn't have the funds.....
Another angle is the general digitization of the older print base. Gerard mentions an 1890 reference, and now it's easy to access and cite materials few could have dreamed of finding and using before digitization. It's like an ordinary scholar can develop the breadth of Fernand Braudel just sitting in their office.... It fundamentally changes the game, and the perspective on the knowledge produced as a result. Isn't that the larger event the print journal changes are part of? I get the impression this is a tidal wave building, and the changes are going to be deep and ongoing.
But basically, yeah, those print journals are headed the way of the Argentavis magnificens. Or the dodo, depending on how you look at it .
I like a hybrid of old and new. I don't flip through entire journals -- I go looking for individual articles. And nothing beats electronically searching cross references to find the latest stuff, or the most important stuff. But then I print a hard copy, get a highlighter and pen for making marginal notations, pour a cup of coffee, and find a nice tree on the Quad to sit beneath...
Hunched in front of a keyboard under flourescent light with people milling about does not promote my best thinking.
Most of the journals that I use (and that my unievrsity carries) don't allow me to download papers that are more than 12 months old. I have to read and copy from paper journals. In the process I often find interesting papers that I would otherwise never have looked at.
I still prefer to have the print versions of a short list of favorite journals, so that I can underline, annotate, etc, plus I am a biblophile and just like to be able to turn pages and carry the articles around with me. I do like to have the electronic files as well, for quick text searches, so I guess I fall into the hybrid camp on this one.
I concur with the points made by Phil and Anne-Marie. I would not enjoy having to turn on an electronic device every time I want to read a journal article. What if the electricity goes out? What if you don't like staring at a glowing screen all the time? Does anyone pick up a journal just to browse out of curiosity? Does anyone leaf through a journal on the bus, train or plane, in the park, in the cafeteria, etc? Not everyone feels compelled to arm themselves with the latest in digital technology or relearn (every year it seems) new search engines, new databases, etc. (egads...I'm becoming my grandfather!)
The only journal I still subscribe to in print is Science. I like the wide range of articles as I am interested in many things, but I never read it cover to cover. For most articles I'll read the abstract, conclusions and maybe a few paragraphs in the middle.
When I was in graduate school I reviewed papers submitted for publication in Analytical Chemistry, and let me tell you, reviewing papers is hard work. You have to derive all the equations, check the graphs, check the references, verify the calculations and it's probably harder than writing the paper in the first place. Although it was cool to see research before it was published (granted, we all knew what other labs were doing so it wasn't a total surprise), it got so we drew straws when a paper came in for review.
I think that hyperlinking in on-line papers will be fantastic and a real time saver. Being able to imbed complex objects like videos, simulations and so forth will be fantastic. Rather than stereo pair images in print it would be very cool to use a 3-d modeling object to manipulate structures in "space."
There is no point to simply replacing print with pixels. The added value is in the interactivity one can achieve with computerized objects.
An excellent topic for Google to consider. I happen to know their head librarian. Google does books...why not journals?
And, then again, necessity is the mother of invention. I'm sure some of you out there have enough knowledge to do this yourself and maybe even make a fortune. Provide a forum, throw in a little incentive for the publishers..and readers..and there ya go!
I love being able to search Geological Society of America Journals on CD. But to appreciate a large map, I have to be in the office to access the large-format plotter.
There are many journals I don't have online access to. If I drive over to the library, I can access some of these, but I'll have to print copies to be able to read them at my convenience.
I have a lot of pdf files having cryptic titles. Maybe some day after I retire, I'll be able to retitle & sort them so I can find what I'm looking for.
My monitor gets messy every time I use my pen to highlight passages in electronic publications.
My biggest concern is accessibility in the future. I can still read my copy of Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought (1888). Will today's electronic document be readable 100 years from now? Relatedly, what are current standards and are they being disseminated? (I don't have a copy.)
National libraries should guarantee this. For example, I believe Sweden's tries to archive all national text pages in the raw, in the same way it has to archive a copy of every book or magazine made by publishers. I'm sure they have some sort of index system as well, analogous to the paper systems.
The format situation must be a problem, but semirigid standards such as pdf and ps is perhaps getting there.
I agree with Phil the Chemist. Electronic searches are brilliant and time saving. But a hard copy is hard to beat for comfort and convenience and ease of use -- try reading a paper on a computer while lying down on a couch, or sitting in a rocking chair on the verandah.
I do med sci and PubMed is pretty damn good. I particularly like the 'Related Articles' link for each paper, which has thrown up some very nice surprises.
Oh, yes. But that is a technique choice - in the time perspective that some are discussing here (decades or centuries) other techniques will arise.
There has been work since several years to replace paper with electronic paper - folders of plastic or paper like materials where text is downloaded and displayed in reflective mode. (As print paper.)
I don't know if these devices, if realized, will ever be as comfortable as print paper - but OTOH they may solve the pool side problem of paper getting wet. :-)