What effect does electronic publishing have on scholarly communication?
There are a lot of unanswered questions about how electronic publishing will change scholarly communiation. Many believe that electronic publishing can only have a positive effect on scholarly communication. This is not necessarily the case at least in the short term. At this point in time, electronic publishing is not fully replacing paper publishing. This is the vision that many people have, but we are currently living in a world where both types of publishing exist simultaneously. What this means for researchers is that they have a new and often expensive type of resource, not a replacement, to integrate into the system.
Electronic resources have created a variety of new issues. To obtain wide-reaching access, the appropriate licensing terms must be negotiated. When it comes to electronic resources, libraries generally cannot choose to own these resources. They are able to provide access through a publisher or vendor. Because of this ownership issue, libraries are grappling with how to ensure perpetual access to what was paid for if an electronic subscription is cancelled or discontinued. In the case of paper resources, you still have all of the previous issues or editions as a resource when you cancel a subscription. Also, because of technological changes, librarians and scholars alike are concerned about the permanence of electronic publications.
Electronic publishing has led to the birth of open archives, e-print, and preprint archives which do provide a wealth of essentially free information online. Unfortunately, these options do not always provide the same peer-review process as traditional journals. Additionally, these options have been adopted only in a limited number of disciplines.
There is no question that electronic publishing offers a wealth of new opportunities for scholarly publishing. In electronic publishing, articles can be infused with multimedia components. For example, it is possible to see a video of an experiment as well as read about it. A poem can be heard in the author's voice as the text is viewed. The amount of access that can be provided electronically has the potential to be vastly more wide-reaching than traditional print. The ability to search electronic documents and to provide links between documents greatly enhances the experience of the researcher. In time, many believe that electronic publishing can be more cost-effective than print. Great promise certainly exists in the area of electronic publishing and time will tell how much it effects scholarly communication. However, resources which require additional payments on top of subscription prices are rising much faster than inflaction creating obvious funding challenges and requiring painful decisions. Ultimately, if libraries can afford access to fewer, more expensive resources, how will scholarly communication be affected? No one knows for sure.
For additional information on electronic publishing in the sciences, see the Proceedings of the International Council for Science Press Workshop entitled "Economics, real costs and benefits of electronic publishing in science - a technical study."
