Talking Past Each Other: Making Sense of the Debate over Electronic Publication

This paper discusses the implications electronic dissemination for the peer-reviewed serial publication system. To make sense of this complex issue, it is helpful to view it from the perspective of the origins of the system and its three core functions, the ranking of scholarship, facilitating interactive communication among scholars, and creating a comprehensive archive of scholarly and scientific knowledge. Each of these core functions has different requirements that are to some extent overlapping but also to some extent in conflict. The Internet opens the possibility of developing a variety of different models of scholarly communication each fulfilling to a greater or lesser extent these three roles paper journals have served and possibly other roles that were not even conceivable prior to the development of world-wide electronic networks. The implications of electronic distribution for ownership and access to the scholarly literature are profound and likely to exacerbate the already serious serial pricing crisis that is hindering the widespread access to scientific and scholarly information. The scholarly community, which both authors the material contained in these publications and largely consumes the finish product holds the key to solving this crisis and allowing the Internet to be a vehicle for facilitating the dissemination of publicly funded research and scholarship rather than resulting in its transfer to private ownership. Three years ago, Harold Varmus proposed the formation of PubMed Central as a federally funded freely accessible Internet-based archive of biomedical publications (Varmus, 1999). While it was not the first proposal for using the Internet to provide comprehensive and open access to scientific literature, the fact it was initiated by the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a tremendous uproar in both the scientific and publishing communities. Although there was a great deal of support for the concept of creating such an archive, making it successful apparently took more influence than even the director of the NIH could muster. Varmus left the NIH shortly after dropping the PubMed Central bombshell and while the NIH went on to implement the archive, after three years it carries only a small fraction of the vast biomedical literature. The heated discussion over the proposal that took place during the spring and summer of 1999 is an interesting microcosm of the wider debate that continues on across scientific and scholarly diciplines. The controversy is motivated by two powerful forces that one way or another are going to result in a vastly different system for disseminating scientific and scholarly information. The first, generally referred to as the serial pricing crisis, reflects the dramatic rise in the cost of serial publications over the last 30 or 40 years and indirectly the commercialization of scholarly publishing. The second is the rapid conversion from paper to an electronic dissemination for peer-reviewed serial publications (Van Orsdel; Born, 2002).