---------------------------- Text of forwarded message -----------------------
Date:         Thu, 19 Mar 1992 17:56:44 EST
From:         Stevan Harnad <harnad@PRINCETON.EDU>
Subject:      Abstract: What Scholars Want and Need from Electronic Journals

	 Abstract of paper to be presented at ASIS 1992 SESSIONS ON
	 "FULL-TEXT ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO PERIODICALS," sponsored by the
	 ASIS Special Interest Group on Library Automation and
	 Networking (SIG/LAN) and the Association of Research Libraries
	 (ARL) at the 55th ASIS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh Hilton,
	 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 26-29, 1992. Session II.
	 Full-Text Electronic Access to Periodicals: Strategies for
	 Implementation

           WHAT SCHOLARS WANT AND NEED FROM ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

                       Stevan Harnad

For scholars and scientists, paper is not an end but a means. It has
served us well for several millenia, but it would have been suprising
indeed if this man-made medium had turned out to be optimal for all
time. In reality, paper has always had one notable drawback. Although
it allowed us to encode, preserve and share ideas and findings
incomparably more effectively than we could ever have done orally, its
tempo was always lamentably slower than the oral interactions to which
the speed of thought seems organically adapted. Electronic journals
have now made it possible for scholarly publication to escape this
rate-limiting constraint of the paper medium, allowing scholarly
communication to become much more rapid, global and interactive than
ever before. It is important that we not allow the realization
of the new medium's revolutionary potential to be retarded by clinging
superstitiously to familiar but incidental features of the paper
medium.

It is also useful to remind ourselves now and again why scholars and
scientists do what they do, rather than going straight into the junk
bond market: They presumably want to contribute to mankind's cumulative
knowledge. They have to make a living too, of course, but if doing that
as comfortably and prosperously as possible were their primary motive
they could surely find better ways. Prestige no doubt matters too, but
here again there are less rigororous roads one might have taken than
that of learned inquiry. So scholars publish not primarily to pad
their CVs or to earn royalties on their words, but to inform their peers
of their findings, and to be informed by them in turn, in that
collaborative, interactive spiral whereby mankind's knowledge
increases. My own estimate is that the new medium has the potential to
extend individual scholars' intellectual life-lines (i.e., the
size of their lifelong contribution) by an order of magnitude.

What scholars accordingly need is electronic journals that provide:
(1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and
publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer
commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and
retrievable electronic archive. Ideally, the true costs of providing
these services should be subsidized by Universities, Learned Societies,
Libraries and the Government, but if they must be passed on to the
"scholar-consumer," let us make sure that they are only the real costs,
and not further unnecessary ones arising from emulating inessential
features of the old medium. PSYCOLOQUY, an peer-reviewed electronic
journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association and
co-edited and archived at Princeton and Rutgers Universities, is
attempting to provide a model for future scholarly electronic
periodicals of this kind.

              REFERENCES

Garfield, E. (1991) Electronic journals and skywriting: A complementary
medium for scientific communication? Current Contents 45: 9-11,
November 11 1991

Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.

Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in
scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific
knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.

Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science,
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Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A
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Nature 322: 24 - 5.

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
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Electronic Archive: Scientific Publishing for the 90s Psychological
Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November
11 1991).

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the
Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review
2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2
1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach
Holme Publishers, 1992; and in A. L. Okerson (ed.) Directory of
Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 2nd
edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of
Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992).

Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the
American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for
Electronic Publishing (in press)

Katz, W. (1991) The ten best magazines of 1990.
Library Journal 116: 48 - 51.

Mahoney, M.J. (1985) Open Exchange and Epistemic Progress.
American Psychologist 40: 29 - 39.

Wilson, D. L. (1991) Testing time for electronic journals.
Chronicle of Higher Education September 11 1991: A24 - A25.