World Wide Information Systems are here
The question is no longer whether research literature will migrate to fully electronic   dissemination, but rather how quickly this transition will take place 

The dominant mode of dissemination will be via a single electronic library, or database, which will be the heart of a "worldwide information system." The characteristics of this DB...

High quality, low-bandwidth, and standardized platform independent output formats.

Currently the Los Alamos electronic preprint service receives 18,000 submissions per year
There is no peer review and to date there have been no abuses. Progressive journals have begun to accept the archive identifier as the electronic submission itself, and conduct their editor/referee interactions as well by means of the version retrieved from the archive.

Indexing and maintenance is required to keep these living research archives from becoming data cemeteries. (don't store what you need in a legacy data land-fill)

The paper journal system is an artifically partitioned database. The unified global raw databsed of electronic preprints offers dramatic improvements in flexability, more efficient two-way transmission, quicker access to related research through hyperlinking, semi-automated indexing, and better protection for authors. There needs to be new types of metal level indexing and new intellectual overlays to augment the filtering role of the traditional peer review system.

The preferred electronic format 10 years from now won't be any of the formats we use today. The current model of funding publishing companies won't last.

Abstract

I describe a set of automated archives for electronic communication of research information that have been operational in many fields of physics, and some related and unrelated disciplines, starting from 1991. These archives now serve over 35,000 users worldwide from over 70 countries, and process more than 70,000 electronic transactions per day. In some fields of physics, they have already supplanted traditional research journals as conveyers of both topical and archival research information. Many of the lessons learned from these systems should carry over to other fields of scholarly publication, i.e. those wherein authors are writing not for direct financial remuneration in the form of royalties, but rather primarily to communicate information (for the advancement of knowledge, with attendant benefits to their careers and professional reputations). These archives have in addition proven equally indispensible to researchers in less developed countries.

A major lesson we learn is that the current model of funding publishing companies through research libraries (in turn funded by overhead on research grants) is unlikely to survive in the electronic realm. It is premised on a paper medium that was difficult to produce, difficult to distribute, difficult to archive, and difficult to duplicate -- a medium that hence required numerous local redistribution points in the form of research libraries. 

The electronic medium shares none of these features and thus naturally facilitates largescale disintermediation, with the resulting communication of research information both more efficient and more cost-effective. A correctly configured fully electronic scholarly journal can be operated at a fraction of the cost of a conventional print journal, and could for example be fully supported by author subsidy (page charges or related mechanism, as already paid to some journals), ideally allowing for free network distribution and maximal benefit both to authors and readers.

The electronic medium should not be constrained by any former print incarnation and, in particular, easily implemented quality appraisal mechanisms in the electronic realm will be dramatically superior to the binary (i.e. one-time, all-or-nothing) procedure employed by the print medium, which in turn frequently conveys inadequate signal. Moreover, authors and their funding institutions will be empowered to insist upon retaining the right to distribute electronic research documents and attachments in the format produced by the authors. Authoring tools already allow a highly sophisticated end-user format, including automatic network linkages, and will continue to improve.

The essential question at this point is not *whether* the scientific research literature will migrate to fully electronic dissemination, but rather *how quickly* this transition will take place now that all of the requisite tools are on-line. 

Secondary open questions include determining 

• the most effective means of cost recovery for the disseminators of this information, 
• what agencies will be responsible for insuring the 
• long-term archival integrity, 
• indexing, and 
• cross-compatibility for the various research databases, and 
• how peer review will be organized for those disciplines that depend on the value-added it can in principle provide.
• FAIR USE: I reserve the right to distribute this electronic document in any way I so desire. It is publicly posted to the internet on my server, and anyone is free to establish a link to it from a subsidiary server (but not to copy it for public posting on a remote server, since that could lead to an undesirable proliferation of obsolete versions). It should not be reprinted for inclusion in any publication for sale without my explicit permission.

e-Print Opportunities

In October 1994, the APS (American Physical Society) hosted an "e-Print archive workshop" at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in part to facilitate its own entry into the electronic arena. Since then, the server network based at Los Alamos has experienced continued dramatic growth in both its breadth of coverage and worldwide usage, and the arrival of NSF funding in the spring of '95 has meant as well an interdisciplinary advisory board, full-time programming support and significant improvements in functionality. 

The archives now process many millions of electronic transactions of all sorts per month, and the submission rate has doubled since Oct. '94 to an anticipated 18,000 new submissions during calendar year '96. The physics community is rapidly moving to realize the vision for the future expressed in the "Report of the APS Task Force on Electronic Information Systems" (Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 36 (1991) 1119): "The dominant mode [of dissemination] will be via a single electronic physics library, or Physics Database, which will be the heart of a worldwide Physics Information System."

Much of the growth over the past two years has been in areas of physics outside of the original core constituency of high energy physics. For example the condensed matter archive (cond-mat) has had its submission rate double during this period to over 200 submissions per month, and sends daily "abstracts received" listings to over 3000 registered e-mail subscribers. The astrophysics (astro-ph) archive has similary doubled its submission rate to roughly 200 per month and also sends its daily notifications to over 3000 subscribers. The continued stability of the database has moreover led to increased archival usage in all subject areas covered: the vast majority of requests are for papers more than a month old, and over a third of the requests are for papers more than a year old.

The archives coordinated from Los Alamos offer a variety of choices of high quality, low-bandwidth, and standardized platform independent output formats. Recent improvements in, and more widespread usage of, end-user tools such as WorldWideWeb browsers have vastly simplified both retrieval of information from, and submission to, the archives. Near-term concerns have shifted to the continued development of a robust global mirroring system, and to better means of handling meta-level indexing information. 

Additional mirror distribution sites (most recently added in France and the U.K., joining the Italian, Japanese, and German mirrors; with additional servers projected soon to go on-line in Sweden, Australia, Brazil, Taiwan, and Russia) have given better response times, especially to international users whose access is increasingly impeded due to network congestion caused by recent increases in non-academic network traffic. In the long-term, the mirrored distribution also provides a global backup system resistant to localized database corruption and/or loss of network connectivity. 

The functionality of this unified global raw database offers potential dramatic improvements over the research communication mediated by the artificially partitioned database of the paper journal system. In addition to the efficient two-way transmission capabilities, as well as indexing and automated hyperlink references within papers, the system has a password protection scheme which allows authors to transfer ``ownership'' to any journal (or equivalent third-party overlay) for the purpose of freezing the submission, stamping a ``published'' reference, or incorporating errata/addenda (all by author/journal negotiation). Original versions of modified papers are archived, and even intermediate versions can in principle be reconstructed from a series of replacements. 

These global archives are not at all incompatible with the filtering role historically provided by the journal system. To the contrary, they beckon for learned societies such as the APS to augment their current roles with new forms of intellectual overlays never before feasible. The APS and other Physics Societies could further speed this development by promoting a shared copyright scheme to their members, explicitly allowing authors (and their institutions) to retain electronic full distribution rights to documents as produced by the authors.

Publication and research habits will of course continue to vary from scientific discipline to discipline, and even from subfield to subfield of Physics, but the current framework is already flexible enough to accommodate a variety of behaviors on the part of both authors and evaluators. The majority of authors continue to submit in parallel with conventional journal submission to take advantage of immediate distribution (and de facto precedence claim), and subsequent revisions frequently benefit as much or more from direct reader feedback as from the conventional referee process. Some authors feel more comfortable submitting only after a conventional refereeing process, with an attached "to appear in" comment, still taking advantage of both the advance distribution and archival availability. Certain journals have begun to accept the archive identifier as the electronic submission itself, and conduct their editor/referee interactions as well by means of the version retrieved from the archive. Astrophysical Journal Letters (published by the American Astronomical Society) actively encourages authors of accepted letters to place the "preprint" of the final accepted version in the astro-ph archive. The identifying number is then used to add a link directly to the astro-ph from a web page with a list of letters that have been accepted but not yet published. Physical Review D has similarly begun to add such link information to its own web pages, and in addition uploads directly to the archive information concerning papers "to appear", and later their published status -- the information is then available whenever users search the archive listings or browse abstracts. Better coordination with the existing archives could provide similar immediate benefits to readers of other APS journals.

At the APS workshop two years ago, it was emphasized how recent developments had exposed the extent to which publishers had defined themselves in terms of production and distribution, roles which we now regard as largely automated. (For a complete and updated version of these comments, see this Unesco presentation.) The pressing need remains organization of intellectual value-added, and this type of information can be overlayed on the global raw archive and maintained by any third parties. The archive could be effectively partitioned into sectors, gradated according to overall importance, quality of research, or other useful criteria, and papers could be shifted retroactively as dictated by additional information or follow-up research. And rather than face only an undifferentiated bitstream, the average reader could benefit from an interface that recommended a set of "essential reads" for a given subject from any given time period. There could also be retroactively added descriptive information, "this paper was important since it drew upon a,b,c [hyperlinks to sources] and led to new developments x,y,z [more hyperlinks]" to provide a further guide to the literature. Or the interface could point to a specific paper as having been important, but warn the beginner to go first to a later paper by the same (or other authors) that subsumes, extends, or corrects the same results in a more understandable fashion; or this paper generated much attention but skip it since the fad played itself out and people returned to more serious pursuits. Even interdisciplinary research (for example if a particle physicist wished to peruse the recent literature in biophysics or even biochemistry) can be easily facilitated by an interface that allows rapid identification of papers that provide pedagogic review material or are otherwise likely to be of specific interest to outsiders. Further possibilities such as moderated comments threads attached to specific points in papers together with more exotic features can be added in successive stages as desired.

At least the essential question at this point is no longer whether the scientific research literature will migrate to fully electronic dissemination, but rather how quickly this transition will take place now that all of the requisite tools are on-line. 

We eagerly anticipate a vastly improved and more useful electronic literature, taking advantage of the flexibility afforded by the electronic medium and unhindered by artifacts of its evolution from paper. The APS and other Physics Societies around the world should take advantage of the extent to which the physics community has already jumped far ahead of other research disciplines in all of this, and ideally the standards set by this community can serve as a model for the rest of scientific research communication.

Risks

We should also be alert to risks borne by authors who may find themselves prematurely encouraged to abandon "chemicals adsorbed onto sliced processed dead trees" in favor of an electronic-only archival format. There is a certain leap of faith involved here, since every once in a while one does after all get lucky and write a paper that could still attract readership a century from now. The physical format, with a worldwide system of institutional libraries serving as a multiply redundant distributed archive, has proven robust on the timescale of centuries to anything short of global cataclysm (in which case we'd probably have more pressing concerns). 

No current electronic format has proven similar longevity --- for the simple reason that all have been in existence for little more than a decade if that. Few claim to know what will be the preferred electronic format a century from now, but some argue convincingly that it won't be any of the formats we use today. 

Just as endangered material on decaying acid paper is currently migrated to microfilm, automated translation to newer and more general electronic formats should always be possible during transition periods, provided there is an acknowledged need to prevent our living research archives from becoming data cemeteries.

(appeared in APS newsletter, Nov '96) by Paul Ginsparg, Los Alamos Labs

Do we need Peer Review and the Paper Journal?

The High TC field has, I guess, colored my view of the question of peer review and made me perhaps even more of an agnostic. I know peer review is regarded as Holy generally in the scientific community. But having watched the field of High TC, which has been a very contentious field and a very active field in the last while, I've become somewhat of an agnostic on peer review, on the uses and abuses of peer review. There are three reasons that are generally given for why we should do peer review.

The first one is validation. This says that refereeing somehow assures the scientific soundness of work. Of course this only occurs to a certain extent. Certain works get through which are not scientifically sound. We all know that. And also, as it was pointed out earlier by Michael, the number of papers that are actually rejected is relatively small. 20% maybe are rejected out of the Physical Review but then a lot of them will appear somewhere else. So actually it doesn't end up rejecting a lot of papers. I think the point is that the real validation of work occurs in a different way. Mainly, if an important result is claimed by somebody, people try to reproduce it, to repeat it, to check the calculations, and that is how work is validated, and that's the real validation process. What really makes a scientific result important and validated is when it has been reproduced and checked, and not really whether it has appeared or not appeared in Phys Rev or another refereed journal. It's not the refereeing process really, it's process of repeating it and checking it that shows it is a valid result.

The second thing that's also mentioned as a virtue of peer review is that it improves the publication. Well, we again had a presentation from Michael who presented numerical evidence that, in fact, the improvements are generally small and relatively minor. And that tallies with my own experience as a referee mainly, but also as an author. When some referee tells me to change something, I usually do the minimum that will pacify this referee and I think I'm not alone in that. So in many cases people are minimalists. 

So, I do see a future for journals. I think they will be a future as compendia for more important papers in various forms so that they're, in that sense, adding prestige. I think people would be interested in having collections (something like the Physical Review Letters) of papers that are considered the most prestigious, to browse through at a later stage. So, I think there will be a continuing role for journals but I do think we should try to take advantage of the new methods of assessing papers that the electronic E-print revolution offers to us. 

Address by Dr. Paul Ginsparg, Los Alamos Labs
Formatted by Dr. Steve Bett, ECRC-Lamar University

                    The Journal of High Energy Physics is one publication that works
                    closely with an archive. Its Web site includes a "mirror," or
                    complete copy, of a popular physics electronic archive located at
                    Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico. The author of a
                    paper in that e-print archive can submit it for publication in the
                    journal by filling out a form on the Web and supplying the paper's
                    identification number in the archive. The "overwhelming majority" of
                    the papers published by the journal have come from the archive,
                    says Mr. Amati, the journal's project chairman. 

                    Marketing also plays a role in attracting both submissions and
                    readers. "You've got to get out there and advertise it and sell it,"
                    says Mr. Brown, of the British physics institute. The institute has
                    bought advertisements in physics periodicals and has sponsored
                    receptions at conferences of physicists to promote the New
                    Journal of Physics. 

                    Journals that are not backed by a publisher may not have the
                    resources to beat the bushes for submissions. For example, the
                   Journal of Interactive Media in Education, an electronic-only
                    publication based at the Open University, in Britain
                    (http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/), received about a dozen
                    submissions last year, says Simon Buckingham Shum, one of the
                    journal's editors and a researcher at the university's Knowledge
                    Media Institute. But he and the rest of the journal's editors, all of
                    whom are volunteers, haven't had the time this year to solicit
                    manuscripts aggressively. Without a publisher to maintain the
                    journal's visibility, submissions to it have dropped off, he says.
                    "When we get busy, the journal suffers." 

                    Another crucial factor is whether an electronic journal is included in
                    the indexes that are popular with academics in a given field. If the
                    journal is not indexed, scholars may never find papers it has
                    published that are relevant to their research, and other researchers
                    will not be interested in submitting work to it. 

                    Particularly important is coverage by the Institute for Scientific
                    Information, a Philadelphia-based company that indexes about
                    8,000 journals it deems to be the most important. It produces
                    electronic data bases and printed volumes indicating which papers
                    have been cited by other authors, and it compiles statistics that are
                    meant to reflect the impact of various journals in a field. The data
                    bases also are used to produce statistics that estimate the influence
                    of academic departments at universities. 

                    "I.S.I. is the one that we feel we really need to capture," says Mr.
                    Seitter, of the meteorological society. "Until Earth Interactions
                    shows up there, it's going to be hard for authors to get the kind of
                    credit they need for their publications." 

                    The company monitors 15 journals that are disseminated only in
                    electronic format, says a spokeswoman, Jacqueline H. Trolley.
                    They include two from M.I.T. Press -- the Chicago Journal of
                    Theoretical Computer Science and Studies in Nonlinear
                    Dynamics and Econometrics -- and journals from a range of other
                    fields, including New Astronomy, Postmodern Culture, and
                    Sociological Research Online. 

                    As it does when judging whether to include a printed journal in its
                    data base, the company looks for evidence of high academic
                    quality in electronic journals that it is considering, Ms. Trolley says.
                    However, it has adapted some of its criteria: Rather than insisting
                    that an on-line journal publish regular issues, the company will
                    cover an electronic publication if it disseminates new material at
                    least once every six months. 

                    Other indexes also cover electronic journals. For example, the
                    Chemical Abstracts Service, operated by the American Chemical
                    Society, follows 30 electronic-only journals.