Conference papers

Digital Issues I

Five things librarians and publishers don't know about electronic scholarly publishing: A researcher's perspective

Dr Elaine Lally

Institute for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney

Abstract

New information and communications technologies are transforming scholarly communication, just as they are transforming all areas of life. Librarians and publishers, the traditional intermediaries in the scholarly communication process, have had a great deal of success in responding to these developments. The rapidity of technological change has meant, however, that they have largely had to rely on their traditional understandings of how the scholarly communication process operates. This paper will give a humanities and social sciences researcher's perspective on how the emergence of and increasing reliance on electronic forms of scholarly communication is changing the process of doing research itself. In particular, the paper will draw attention to five key issues which must be taken into account in meeting the needs of researchers within the emerging electronic environment.

Scholarly traditions and technological change

Many of us here will remember (and no doubt be nostalgic for) the 'good old days' of traditional research practice: based around well-defined named disciplines, within which the range of relevant literature was clear (particularly helpful for postgraduate students and new entrants to the field), largely because those disciplinary boundaries were policed through the efforts of members of the scholarly community. The community was often focussed around a scholarly society, which was generally the publisher of the major journals in particular disciplines or sub-disciplines. Life was simpler for libraries, too, who could think in terms of 'holdings' for the particular disciplines of their constituencies. Scholars would simply visit the library to keep abreast of new developments in their field, and would have their own subscriptions to particularly important journals in their field.

The internet has changed all this. Unsurprisingly, technological change has had the most rapid impact in the science-based disciplines. Academics in the humanities and social sciences have also though, with the exception of a very few diehard eccentrics, enthusiastically taken up e-mail and the world wide web and integrated them into their teaching and research (see Applebee et al. 2000 for a recent Australian survey). The ease of use and widespread acceptance of e-mail and the web means that these two media have become the twin pillars of the infrastructure of the electronic environment.¹

From the point of view of the consumer of this information, there is a sense that it is not possible to keep up with the amount of material that is out there to be read. And even if it were possible to keep up with the flood of relevant material, it would not necessarily be possible to find it all, since it's no longer clear where you need to look to find it. The seemingly continuous acceleration of these technological, social and cultural changes - when we have time to stop to think about it - induces a sense of vertigo in those of us who seek to chart and interpret them.

From the point of view of those knowledge intermediaries who support researchers and research infrastructure there also seems to be a pervasive sense of crisis. For example, a recent conference on the impact of globalisation on Australian academic research and publishing (held in Sydney in July 2000 and hosted by the National Scholarly Communications Forum) was entitled Scholarship in peril?

It is often said that there is a lack of detailed information about how researchers use electronic information which would lead to a better understanding of the needs of the users of scholarly information (NLA: 3). In this paper, I would like to give a perspective on the electronic research environment from the point of view of the interdisciplinary 'new humanities'.

And I must apologise for my somewhat provocative title - I'm well aware that many of the points I'm making in this paper have been made elsewhere, often by librarians or publishers. I would like to bring together, however, an overview of how the emergence of and increasing reliance on electronic forms of scholarly communication is changing the process of doing research itself. In particular, the paper will draw attention to five key issues that might be taken into account in meeting the needs of researchers within the emerging electronic environment.

1. Communication (researchers are writers as well as readers)

The first point that I would like to make is to stress that from the point of the researcher, what we do involves both reading and writing, and there is little separation between the two activities. Publishers are the intermediaries who take care of the writing and editorial end of the process, whereas librarians take care of making accessible to readers, the end products of the writing. But it's really not a process which begins with writing and ends with reading (which would perhaps be the publisher's perspective on it) or a process which begins with reading and ends with writing (which is perhaps how the library community might conceptualise it). The research process involves both reading and writing as intrinsic and inseparable aspects. Even the peer-review and editorial processes are important aspects of this, since it is only through these activities that a piece of work is polished to a professional standard.

The distinction I would like to bring to your attention, then, is that scholarly communication is indeed just that - communication - rather than a process within which scholarly products are produced and consumed. It often seems to researchers that knowledge intermediaries - and here I would include not just librarians and publishers but also our university administrators and funding agencies - view scholarly communication according to such a production/consumption paradigm. So while there is quite a bit of debate about the 'economics' of scholarly communication - which I acknowledge is very useful from the point of view of all those intermediaries who are responsible for the funding of our knowledge infrastructure - I would suggest that it might also be useful to pay some attention to the changing characteristics of scholarly writing as a communications medium.

2. Community

If communication processes, centrally, are what authors and readers want and need to be supported within the new electronic environment, then the next step is to point out that, for them, this is more about the ongoing conversation within a group of scholars than it is about the production and consumption of scholarly 'information' or knowledge. Scholarly communication has clearly always been based on the ongoing interaction and discussion between a community of scholars - which in the good old days was often easily identified with a learned society. Researchers are increasingly relying on new technologies to support and enhance their community building.

The internet is clearly enabling the creation of new forms of scholarly community. Traditionally scholars were grouped into named disciplines and associations based around a common interest, but the postmodern trend is for communities to be much more informal and transient. These may be based not around a particular abstract intellectual interest but be focused on concrete projects or activities. Examples include the proliferation of electronic discussion lists, some of which may be quite ephemeral, or community building around a website. An example of the latter is the excellent website built to support Miller and Slater's recent book on the internet in Trinidad (2000). The website supports the book by providing extensive illustration of websites (including preserving their interactivity to a limited degree), but it is also an interesting attempt to extend how a scholarly publication is used by its target community. The site includes a guest book and discussion list, and there is an attempt by these authors to set up a process whereby the audience can engage directly in debate with each other and with the authors. (The website is at http://ethnonet.gold.ac.uk/.)

Ron Johnson has suggested that these new forms of community building may pose a threat to traditional knowledge intermediaries who do not adapt to the changing times:

Given that producers and consumers can now directly contact each other, only those intermediaries that add significant value are likely to survive. Libraries will need to place greater emphasis on the value they can add to the knowledge process. (1999: 57)

Johnson refers to this process as 'disintermediation'. But rather than a lessening of the degree of intervention by intermediaries in the knowledge process, it is clear that the process has in many respects become more mediated. The technologies involved, however, serve to hide that mediation, masking it in a seeming transparency. There is much more a sense of communicating directly within a community of scholars. Because of this, it is no longer clear to scholars exactly what services publishers and librarians are providing to them - it appears as if the technology is doing all the work, and there should no longer be any need for these intermediaries. I must stress that this is not a view that I personally subscribe to, but it is an expression of a kind of technological fetishism that is very widespread (Lally 2000).

New information technologies clearly broaden the potential user base for all scholarly material that exists in an internet-accessible form. Electronic databases allow access to material based on keyword searches, while physical library collections and the traditional printed serial formal allow users to find similar content located together. Researchers generally alternate between searching (when looking for something specific) and browsing ('cherry-picking') as approaches to the literature. Both modes of exploration need to be well supported in the new environment, since much research in the humanities and social sciences is interdisciplinary in character.

3. Interdisciplinarity

My own PhD research on home computers was based in a cultural studies department (cultural studies was perhaps the original inter-discipline), but brought in aspects of anthropology and material culture, the sociology of consumer goods, phenomenology and the philosophy of technology. This would not be unusual in its spread.

Interdisciplinarity is particularly a problem for postgraduate students. At the undergraduate level, material is neatly packaged and labelled. Part of the task of the postgraduate student in this interdisciplinary world is to select from the vast range of approaches a particular tool-bag from the literature available. This can be quite a daunting process, potentially never-ending, and it is never quite clear where to draw the line between what is relevant and useful, and what can safely be ignored. Once this selection has been made and the PhD is safely behind you, that (often somewhat arbitrary) selection becomes a personal domain of expertise, which can be built on over the long term.

A number of studies have shown that researchers generally access a wider range of serial titles when they are available digitally through aggregator services than was available in print form in their libraries (NLA: 4). This is also clearly shown in the PEAK experiment at the University of Michigan (Bonn, Mackie-Mason et al. 1999) in the case of Science serials, although there is no reason not to suppose that these results would not be generalisable across disciplines. This kind of behaviour on the part of researchers is both a consequence of increasing interdisciplinarity, but is one of the factors, which is accelerating these changes. The traditional idea that it is possible to identify a core list of journals for a particular constituency of client researchers is increasingly untenable, particularly in new interdisciplinary niche areas (c.f. Joswick and Stierman 1997)

Retrodigitisation may, indeed, be a more important issue for the humanities and social sciences than it is for the sciences, where it is the latest information and results which researchers need to access (hence the rise in importance of pre-print services and 'grey' literature). However the humanities and social sciences remain heavily dependent on the 'canon' and continued use of 'classic' or particularly influential articles and texts. As Professor Malcolm Gilles, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities pointed out in his presentation to the 'Australia's Information Future' workshop, a humanities book or article might only attract substantial interest a decade or more after publication (Gilles 1999: 82). Back issues of journals therefore remain of important research interest, which makes initiatives such as the JSTOR project (www.jstor.org), which involves the progressive digitisation of back runs of core journals, of crucial importance for humanities and social sciences scholars. This project encompasses more than 100 titles across a range of disciplines, including some in humanities and social sciences, but mainly in the traditional disciplines, rather than in newer disciplines such as cultural studies.

4. Authority

There is a danger, however, that the important issue of quality control will be lost in the race to put everything on the web. The editorial processes of peer review are the traditional means of offering a vetting, gatekeeping and quality control function (through the initial selection of articles) and quality improvement (through refereeing and revision). This process ensures the production of research information, which is accredited within a particular scholarly community. Publishers, in particular, are an important part of this process, but this is perhaps an area where librarians have not seen themselves as contributing to. I'd like to suggest that in this new environment we all need to be working together, and that librarians do have an important role to play in the quality control process, and particularly in helping researchers find their way through the amorphous and seemingly infinite mass of research information that is 'out there' in cyberspace.

The technology is clearly already enabling, as we saw above, linkages and connectivity not just between pieces of information, but also between people. What researchers are increasingly finding useful are those electronic portals or gateways, which give access to a range of kinds of service. As Rowse suggests, what researchers are saying is 'Give me a place where I can find all kinds of things that may interest me' (Rowse 1999). I may not know exactly what's going to be there when I get there, but I know I am going to find material of interest to me, including such things as conference announcements and calls for papers, job advertisements, e-mail discussions or bulletin boards and perhaps eventually preprint services (which the scientists clearly find useful). At the moment the creation of these gateways is ad-hoc and it seems that everyone is trying to jump onto the band-wagon, and it's not yet clear how these services can best meet the needs of their users - more research definitely needs to be done in this area.

An interesting development is that of such gateways established by enthusiastic scholars. Two such examples are the CULTSTUD site (http://www.cas.usf.edu/communication/rodman/cultstud/) and Sarah Zupko's PopCultures site (http://www.popcultures.com/). These are very popular among a 'connected' group of cultural studies scholars. Indeed each of these sites - like Don Slater's site mentioned above - was developed and is maintained through the efforts of a single dedicated scholar. It's clear that such projects can be both an important way of developing a public profile for that individual within the community, but also acts informally as a way of filtering, authenticating and 'peer-reviewing' web-based material.

5. Scholarly Information: Gifts or Commodities?

Engaging in scholarly communication is a necessary part of becoming a member of particular academic communities, as I have stressed throughout this paper. From the point of view of the researcher, the cultural 'goods' which circulate within these networks operate, not according to the logic of the commercial transaction, but according to the logic of the gift. This is a well-established distinction in the anthropological literature (Gregory 1982). 'Gift' transactions entail an ongoing social relationship between the transactors, whereas in the commercial relationship there is no expectation of ongoing interdependence. Once the money has changed hands that is the end of the transaction, whereas the exchange of gifts cements social bonds and establishes or maintains an ongoing relationship. As Hyde puts it: 'when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges' (1979: xiv).

In considering this distinction, it can be seen that scholarly products have a profoundly contradictory nature. From the point of view of their producers and consumers, they are part of the circulation of discourse within their community, a kind of 'gift' object (among others, such as the peer reviewing for which scholars receive no financial reward). Hence it still strikes some as 'bizarre that academics produce the materials which publishers then require them to pay to read' (Bekhradmia 1999: 18). Although most researchers are paid a salary to undertake the work they do, they are only reimbursed for their writing in very indirect ways, and any financial return from their work (e.g. through the DETYA Research Quantum distribution) cannot be directly linked back to particular work they have published (and in any case the funds generally go into a common pool). On the other hand, for publishers, scholarly work is a commercially valuable resource, in an economy in which information is increasingly regarded as a highly tradeable and commercially valuable commodity.

This is, in my view, a profound paradox emerging out of irreconcilable contradictions between long-standing traditions and values in research and scholarship and the processes of globalisation and commercialisation. This is a clash of cultures - commercial culture colliding with scholarly culture - and I cannot see how there can be a simple resolution (in constrast to Harnad 1999).

We Need to Work Together

We clearly will not be returning to the good old days when all a researcher needed to do to find their research material was to visit the library. In order to both understand and take full advantage of the emerging forms and media for scholarly communication, what is clear is that we all need to work together.

The technology is changing so rapidly that researchers are generally not aware of all the facilities they have available to them. While there are examples of spectacular uptake of particular technological innovations (e-mail is of course the most stunning example), there often needs to be a process of introducing new facilities in ways which enable to researcher to explore what it can do for them and to test the technology's ability to build itself into the user's pattern of everyday activity and routine (Lally 2000, chapter 4, makes a similar point in relation to home computer acquisition). There is therefore often resistance to trying out new facilities, even though once that resistance is overcome the user may become an evangelical 'convert'. There is therefore a need for ongoing outreach on the part of knowledge intermediaries - working closely and interactively with the scholarly community.

Researchers, as has already been mentioned, generally alternate between searching (when looking for something specific) and browsing ('cherry-picking') as approaches to the literature. Yet, many of the systems currently being developed as aids to the literature essentially relate to directed searching. There is a need for more attention to how to support electronic browsing. To give an example of this, the Amazon.com database is an invaluable research resource - it covers a wider range of material than is held in any one library collection and it gives information about books that have not yet been published. It is also associatively indexed, so that if you look up one book you know of in your field of interest it will suggest others: harking back to the days when you could visit your library's shelves and find not just the specific material you are looking for but also other material which is located with it.²

As Johnson has suggested, disintermediation may mean that knowledge intermediaries need to be adding significant value in order to survive in the new environment. While it is true that it is now possible for scholars to interact directly with each other, it remains the case that this interaction is, in technological terms at least, more mediated than ever. Paradoxically, internet technology appears to involve both increased mediation (in terms of technologies and institutional arrangements which mediate access to research resources) and decreased mediation (in terms of direct contact and networking between researchers and providers of journal content). The decreased mediation may, however, be illusory - being based on increasing transparency of that mediation (technological and institutional) - since from the point of view of the individual researcher it appears that knowledge intermediaries are becoming ever more and more organised and powerful.

A competitive relationship between these groups will have profound effects for those who are the original producers of, and the end consumers of, this information (see McLean 1999 for a discussion of the complex issues surrounding this restructuring process). It is particularly important, therefore, to maintain cooperative rather than competitive relationships between different elements in the chain. So, it's perhaps not helpful when it is suggested that there are 'zealots' within the library community who see publishers 'as a breed of dinosaur destined for extinction' (Bekhradmia 1999: 18). It remains the case, and will, I'm sure, for the foreseeable future, that getting one's work published in a reputable commercially published journal, or one's book published by a commercial publisher will be essential to academic progression.

Governments, particularly research funding bodies, are also increasingly becoming interested in what is happening in this area. There is clearly 'national interest' in the provision of research infrastructure, since it relates to issues of national competitiveness and development and will become increasingly important as we move towards the 'knowledge economy'. (These, we can only hope, will be beneficial times for knowledge workers and intermediaries such as all of us here.)

Notes

1. While CD-ROMs and earlier internet protocols (such as Telnet interfaces) were ubiquitous only three or four years ago, they are no longer part of the mainstream. This interface convergence is definitely, from the user's point of view, a good thing: the more seamless and transparent the electronic environment can become, the better. The requirement for browser plug-ins to view certain kinds of documents (even the widespread PDF format) is still an obstacle to some of my colleagues. The user would prefer not to have to think about the technological infrastructure at all.

2.It might be argued that other library databases do this too, but it may be that there are lessons to be learnt about the way that Amazon does this - you don't have to click through to another 'related material' option to get this information, it's right there in front of you.

References

Applebee, Ann, Peter Clayton, Celina Pascoe and Harry Bruce (2000) 'Australian academic use of the internet: implications for university administrators', Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, 10(2): 141-9.

Bekhradnia, Bahram (1999) 'The scholarly information crisis in the UK: the Follett Report and beyond', in Australia's Information Future: Innovation and Knowledge for the 21st Century, Proceedings of a workshop held 3-4 March 1999 at the Australian National University, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs: 13-24.

Bonn, Maria S., Mackie-Mason, Jeffrey K. et al. (1999) 'A Report on the PEAK Experiment: Usage and Economic Behaviour', D-LIB Magazine, 5(7/8), Jul/Aug.

Gilles, Malcolm (1999) 'Research needs for the new millennium: issues for the humanities', in Australia's Information Future: Innovation and Knowledge for the 21st Century, Proceedings of a workshop held 3-4 March 1999 at the Australian National University, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs: 81-6.

Gregory, Chris (1982) Goods and Commodities. London: Academic Press.

Harnad, Stevan (1999) 'Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals' D-Lib Magazine 5(12) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html

Hyde, Lewis (1979) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books.

Johnson, Ron (1999) 'The challenge of the knowledge economy: managing knowledge', in Australia's Information Future: Innovation and Knowledge for the 21st Century, Proceedings of a workshop held 3-4 March 1999 at the Australian National University, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs: 51-8.

Joswick, K.E. and Stierman, J.K. (1997) 'The core list mirage: a comparison of the journals frequently consulted by faculty and students', College and Research Libraries, 58(1): 48-55.

Lally, Elaine (2000) 'The Computer at Home: Material Culture and the Relationship of Ownership', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney. (A revised version of this thesis is forthcoming with Berg, Oxford.)

Miller, Daniel and Don Slater (2000) The internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.

McLean, Neil (1999) 'Collaborating to compete: the search for new alliances', http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/conference/mclean/collaborate/index.html.

National Library of Australia (2000) A Review of Studies of Users of Scholarly Information, report prepared for the Coalition for Innovation in Scholarly Communication, May.

Rowse, Mark (1999) 'Tell me what you want, what you really, really want!: Research into the online information needs of the STM journal user', http://www.ingenta.com/ingentainstitute.htm

Biographical Sketch:

Elaine Lally is Executive Officer for the Institute for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. Her research interests centre on new technologies and everyday life: The Computer at Home, a book based on her PhD research (a study of home computer ownership) is forthcoming with Berg. She is a member of the editorial committee of Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational and Crosscultural Studies (published by Taylor and Francis). She has presented formal papers at a number of national and international conferences in Australia and overseas.