Embracing electronic publishing

Describes how MCB University Press has started to come to terms with the metamorphosis which electronic publishing offers. Sees a future where interactive multimedia products and services are the norm and are quite differently distributed, based on new alliances from within but also from outside the traditional players. Explores how MCB’s strengths might be used to succeed in the new frameworks and concludes that double-loop action learning is the only viable way ahead. Suggests that authors will be a constant point of reference and that networked desktop PCs and networked homes will open vast new markets to those who can re-present knowledge and information to gain and hold their attention. Outlines what MCB has done so far. reformatted in the typesetting stage of the value chain, it is frequently to produce masters or film for traditional printed journals. Such productivity improvements are piecemeal. The behavior of most academic and professional publishers has been to wait and see what might happen, what someone else might do, rather than to seek to make it happen. At best they have experimented with specific applications. There is a moment in time, however, when such strategies cease to be wise and become potentially disastrous, especially for any relatively small participant in an industry. Indeed, there is much to suggest that smallness can be turned to major advantage at such moments of technological change. Smallness can permit speed and flexibility of response provided there is leadership, skill and determination to make the transition. This article is a case study of one such small participant in Caxtonian publishing, as it seeks to anticipate the metamorphosis that electronic publishing will surely bring – soon. It describes a determination to move from being a reactive, piecemeal user of electronics to enhance traditional productivities to a proactive, leadership role in the new electronics’ institutionalization for publishing. Anticipatory learning The enterprise concerned, MCB University Press, which publishes this journal and 130 more besides, is a learning organization of some considerable age and continuity. We have more than a few achievements behind us (Gore et al., 1994; Wills, 1992). Yet we have not attempted thus far to anticipate anything so profoundly new as the metamorphosis of the entire industry we work within. It would seem to be the supreme test! It has been our policy, and it has been effective, to plan to act over no further a horizon than two to three years. Now we anticipate that we must look ten years ahead to discern what might be the new institutionalizations and where we might make our new contribution. And if that is to be so, we should attempt now to ensure that we are in the optimal places, at the right time, with the right products and services, or nearly so. “Nearly so” seems to us the best we could or should hope for from such an exercise in anticipatory learning. To believe we could do better and arrive at a single forecast, then seek to organize all enterprise to achieve it, is dangerous thinking in a period of structural discontinuities. Our determination to anticipate is therefore driven not by a belief that we can get it right, but rather by an awareness that we cannot afford not to flex. We are also deeply aware – from the literature we publish in our journals and the conferences we attend – that nobody is yet certain what the significant questions are for the future of electronic publishing, let alone what the answers will eventually turn out to be. Those who acknowledge they know least seem to be adrift, like us, in three broad areas of publishing: (1) What might be the formulation of the mainstream knowledge and information electronic products and services themselves – will it be articles per se, collections/issues or keyworded abstracts leading to full publication and interactive contact? (2) What will be the channels of capture, transformation and dissemination through which the products and services will flow, that is, the future of publishing logistics? (3) What will be the transformed framework and ownership of the incoming supply chain of knowledge and information from, and in interaction with, authors? As an enterprise, we are also adrift in the field of financial reconstruction which, although not the subject of this case study, provides a vitally important reason for anticipatory learning. Our financial reconstruction is designed to give the rising generation of managers and staff the opportunity to participate in the equity of the company, with a view to a Stock Market listing, in no more than five years’ time. Any projections of the performance of our enterprise over that timescale must take a view of our ability to face up to and benefit from electronic publishing. The future growth of the enterprise cannot be reliably based on any extrapolation of its achievements over the past 28 years. Nor can future rates of return on investment be taken for granted. Our success thus far can give us the confidence to believe we can make the transformation only if we are willing to identify the 78 Embracing electronic publishing Gordon Wills Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy Volume 6 · Number 4 · 1996 · 77–90