May you live in interesting times is thought by some to be a blessing and by others to be a curse. Many of those involved in scholarly publishing today are likely to consider it both. Over the past two thousand years scholarly publishing has evolved from an oral tradition into a myraid of robust, active, and complex systems of communicatin that include tens of thousands of conferences, proceedings, journals, monographs, and scholarly books.
As scholarly societies were established in the seventeenth century they began publishing proceedings and journals (Ornstein, 1928, cited in Parrot, 1995;). According to Ornstein (1928) the first was Gesta Lynceorum which the Italian Academia dei Lincei published in 1609. It was the proceedings of the organization's meeting and is the first publication of a scientific society.
A few years later the move toward more organized and formal communication between scholars took another step when the Journal des Scavans began publishing in Italy (Parrot, 1995; Guedon, 1994). A second journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, began publishing the same year, 1665. Guedon sees the rise of the journal as more than a mere technological advance. He points out that it changed the function of writing. Before journals, scholarly writing served a primary role as a "prop for memory." But after journals became established, writing "evolved into a virtual discussion space." That is, instead of communicating the accepted cannon of "truth," writing became a way of discussing issues.
Scholarly publishing continued to grow and evolve during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the greatest rate of growth has occurred in this century. The twentieth century has also been one of rapid change and revolution in scholarly publishing.
In this century notable trends include the shift from non-profit publishers such as associations, societies, and universities who produce journals, books, and monographs to for-profit publishers. Some have argued that the increasing dominance of for-profit publishers in the field of scholarly publishing is the major reason for another recent trend - the spiraling costs of journals.
The trends in scholarly publishing, however, are not all that make this an interesting time. Another is the information revolution - the shift from print-based communication to electronic channels of communication. Today there are hundreds of ejournals - scholarly publications that are available on-line via an electronic network. Many such journals have only published a few issues, but they demonstrate the viability of the concept and they bring many new possibilities to the scholarly publishing table.
Some believe electronic journals are likely to overwhelm print journals in the near future.
Traditional scholarly journals will likely disappear within 10 to 20 years. (Odlyzko, 1994 in a paper titled "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals")
Extrapolating from the success of journals that are currently published, it is clear that electronic media will capture a large share of scholarly publication in the next five years, and that printed media will not be competitive in journal publication beyond a few more decades. . . . Conversion and startup costs will delay the dominance of electronic media, but the improvement in marginal cost makes it inevitable. (O'Donnell, 1995, p. 183-184)
O'Donnell makes his prediction even though he is not uncritically enthusiastic about ejournals. Amiran and Unsworth (1991) also believe "Electronic publications are likely to proliferate sooner than most now expect." A major reason they cite for the proliferation is economics. "Economic reasons alone will force letters out of their time-honored sanctuary in wood-products and into the electronic ether." Amiran and Unsworth are concerned, however, about the possibility of commercial organizations controlling academic electronic publishing. "They may come to limit redistribution of such publication or insist on copyright restrictions that may serve their financial interests but not the interests of the research community. In effect, this is the case with print publication: much of it is determined by the financial interests and possibilities of commercial presses . . ." Bailey (1994) is also concerned about control by for-profit publishers. "Commercial publishers have the skills and the resources to produce high-quality electronic publications . . . However, given the ongoing severe crisis in the cost of library materials, we should be hesitant to let them dominate network-based scholarly electronic publishing to the extent that they do print-oriented scholarly publishing without substantial changes in some of their publishing practices. . . . Current trends in the commercial electronic information area do not bode well for the future."
There are, already, a surprising number of electronic journals. The fifth edition of the Directory of Electronic Scholarly Journals, Newsletters, and Discussion Lists, which is published by the American Research Library Association (1995), lists 675 ejournals and about 2500 scholarly discussion lists and newsgroups. The numbers represent a 40% increase over about one year, another indication of the rate of growth.
There are many reasons for the rapid growth in ejournals. Aside from new technology that makes ejournals both possible and relatively easy to disseminate, many of the reasons relate to problems with traditional print journals. Treloar (1995) identifies five major problems:
Treloar's first and last problems, the time lag in publication and the cost of journals, are the two most frequently cited as a reasons for seriously considering a move from print to electronic journal publishing. These same problems, and several others, were identified as critical issues by the Association for Computing Machinery in its proposal to revise its large publishing program to include many more electronic resources (Denning and Rous, 1994). The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), with 78,000 members, publishes 17 periodicals and over 17,000 pages of proceedings a year. After a thorough review of their publishing enterprise they concluded "the traditional scientific publishing system is now facing a variety of breakdowns that must be overcome if the system is to survive." One aspect of their plan to deal with the problems is to "move aggressively toward having the entire ACM literature in an on-line digital library."
It is not yet clear whether the future, particularly the immediate future, will be characterized by the demise of all but a few printed scholarly publications as electronic publications come to dominate the field. All the possible futures are, however, more complex than a simple shift from print delivery to electronic delivery of similar scholarly materials. The future we actually evolve into will be determined by many factors, some technical, some social, some political, and some organizational. In this paper, I will examine some of the issues associated with this "bridging period" between a print dominated scholarly publishing environment and one in which new electronic forms of communication play a major if not dominant role.