From the Era of Print to the Reality of Electronic Publishing

1. Electronic journals will become dominant (over conventional paper publishing) in the next 5–15 years

In 1998, a British librarian reported that his university spent just 10 % of its budget on electronic items [2]. Fourteen years later, a survey found that 76 % of scholarly readings were obtained through electronic means [3]. By 2018, it was reported that virtually all STM articles were available online [4]. A 2019 article indicates that only 8 % of researchers read print articles from a print journal [5]. The ICSU Press workshop prediction was clearly correct.

2. Peer review and methods to “brand” electronic papers will be indispensable to successful electronic publishing

Today in 2023, the research community continues to see peer review as fundamental to scholarly communication [4]. Open access journals as well as those behind paywalls recognize peer review as a mark of quality, but alternative approaches to the traditional peer review process are now practiced by some publishers. Journals are still proudly branded by publishers. Major journals continue to report their Journal Impact Factors, but many alternative metrics are in use. Back in 2018, Herman Spruijt of Elsevier said that we must accept that the next generation may want the “article” rather than the journal [2], but 25 years later, both authors and publishers still accept that choice of journal is important; the article is not yet fully freed from its “container.” The ICSU Press workshop conclusion is broadly justified but some recent initiatives were perhaps not foreseen.

3. Electronic publishing may be just as expensive as, or even more expensive than paper publishing

I am grateful to Alexander Grossmann of HTWK Leipzig for useful discussions on this topic. He published in 2021 a very useful market analysis [6] and welcomes comments on ScienceOpen [7]. (ScienceOpen is a research, networking, and discovery platform that boasts some of the recent initiatives mentioned above.) In the era of print, publishers bore the costs of authoring, submission, initial editorial checking, managing the peer review process, and, after acceptance of an article, copyediting, typesetting, printing, and dissemination of the printed journal issues. In the digital era, there are additional costs for generation of a media-independent electronic version of the text, tagging, reference linking, DOI assignment (plus a fee for Crossref), metadata generation, etc., plus costs associated with the digital infrastructure for content management, peer review, access and rights management, article hosting and long-term archiving. In addition, there are costs associated with maintenance of the IT infrastructure. Further costs would be associated with more sophisticated enhancements such as live graphics. Costs for printing and mailing of physical issues are saved, of course, but these are estimated to be less than 5 % of total costs. It is obvious that creating a digital version must be associated with substantial extra costs.

4.Publishers have done a poor job explaining to authors and librarians how they have added value to authors’ work

This is a contentious issue. Alexander Grossmann has summarized some of the “nonpublication” costs borne by publishers [6], but opinions vary on how publishers’ profit margins are justified in relation to these costs.

5. Gathering detailed information on the searching habits of scientists when they access electronic publications will pose ethical questions for publishers

When the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE) was founded in 1997 it was not known that by 2023 our mobile phones would reveal our precise whereabouts and search engines would target us with advertisements based on the data about us that they collect. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is by no means new, but as used in 2023 it raises a host of new ethical issues. The 1998 workshop did not anticipate privacy regulations such as GDPR. There is also no mention of the intellectual property implications of one’s search terms being recorded.

6. The infrastructure that is in place in advanced countries will continue to need maintenance. In some countries large capital investments are essential if citizens are to benefit from services made available via the Internet

This is still true. Open access (OA) is also a big issue for researchers in many disadvantaged countries and institutions. The big OA movement [8, 9, 10] began after 1998. The impacts of AI, social media, mobile technologies, and blockchain on electronic publishing were unforeseen in 1998.

7. There is an urgent need to maintain archives of electronic publications, but who should be the keepers of the archives?

Fear of information loss has greatly decreased over the years, though cyberattacks are a new challenge not really considered in the 1990s. Nowadays, IT advances have addressed the issue of hardware failure, mirror sites are maintained, and journal archives are commonly preserved by Controlled LOCKSS (CLOCKSS) which employs an approach to archiving (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that was initiated by Stanford University librarians in 1999.

8. Electronic publishing has reached an exciting stage. The next few years will bring practical knowledge about how current electronic products are used and how much people are prepared to pay

We now have the reality beyond the excitement, but it seems appropriate to reproduce Dick Kaser’s comments reported in my 1998 article [2]: “Think of the potential. In e-Utopia, full text will be set loose, links and citations encouraged, browsing permitted, spontaneous purchases supported, and reuse endorsed. The challenge is to maintain the revenue stream so that we can continue “publishing”, to manage in an orderly fashion the movement from print to electronic and to expand readership of the journal.” Two issues we now have to address are FAIRness [11] in publication (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) and how to distribute the costs of OA publishing among the stakeholders as “Plan S” demands widespread open access [12].

Since January 1992, Wendy Warr <wendy@warr.com> from Wendy Warr & Associates has been supplying business and competitive intelligence services to a broad spectrum of clients in the United States, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia. (source https://www.warr.com/)

About this article first printed in Chem. Int. 1998, 20(5), 140-141:

In 1998 Michael Bowen was working for the American Chemical Society and was secretary of the IUPAC committee on Printed and Electronic Publications (CPEP); In print, this report is dated 4 August 1998; it is an error and instead it should read 8 April as noted 4/8/98 in the original doc file. Considering the production workflow at that time, it is likely that the American date format was simply not properly converted by the (English) production editor at Blackwell.

Readers interested in reviewing and commenting earlier reports published in Chemistry International, are invited to review the magazine archives <https://archive.org/details/chemistryinternational>