ELECTRONIC SERIAL PUBLISHING AND ITS EFFECT ON THE TRADITIONAL INFORMATION CHAIN

Electronic information transfer is not new. It is not a new idea that computers and networking are transforming libraries and that it is possible to build a complete electronic library. Many of the concepts were published almost half a century ago in the famous paper by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The first attempt at large scale implementation was performed at M F . In 1965 a planning conference was held which resulted in the INTREX project (information transfer experiments), directed by Professor Overhage, professor of engineering at MIT. This project was ahead of its time because the aspirations were beyond the capabilities of the existing computers and available computer power, but the ideas behind it, are still valid, despite being formulated more than a quarter of a century ago. The three main streams of progress in the field of information transfer were defined by Overhage (1966) as follows:


Introduction Electronic information transfer: past and present projects
Electronic information transfer is not new. It is not a new idea that computers and networking are transforming libraries and that it is possible to build a complete electronic library. Many of the concepts were published almost half a century ago in the famous paper by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
The first attempt at large scale implementation was performed at M F . In 1965 a planning conference was held which resulted in the INTREX project (information transfer experiments), directed by Professor Overhage, professor of engineering at MIT. This project was ahead of its time because the aspirations were beyond the capabilities of the existing computers and available computer power, but the ideas behind it, are still valid, despite being formulated more than a quarter of a century ago. The three main streams of progress in the field of information transfer were defined by Overhage (1966) as follows:  How right he was and still is today! , There have been many subsequent pioneering research and development projects involving the concept of the electronic journal. It would take too much space to present a comprehensive overview, so I list just some of them: were "to explore and evaluate various fonns of user communications through an electronic journal and information network and to assess the cost-efficiency and objective impact of such a system".
Some important projects being carried out at present deserve to be mentioned.
The Mercury Project could be considered a follow up of the INTREX-project. In a series of planning meetings during the academic year 1987/1988, a group from Carnegie Mellon and OCLC, came to the conclusion that the technical barriers experienced by INTREX were disappearing and that the declining costs of computing implied that the cost of electronic libraries would be comparable to traditional libraries within a decade. This analysis resulted in 1988 in the formulation of a plan which was published in the first "Mercury Technical Report Series" (1989). The serious work on the Mercury Electronic Library began early in 1989.
Elsevier's TUI.,IP-project, another well known project, started in March 1991 and is a cooperative research project testing systems for networked delivery and use of journals in the field of materials science. Eleven US university libraries are the initial participants, together with five official observers.
In another recent development, the "Red Sage Project", an experiment involving Springer Verlag, AT&T Bell Laboratories and the University of California, San Francisco, Springer Verlag will provide "electronic subscriptions" for 30 journals in the field of molecular biology and radiology to the UCSF Library and the Center for Knowledge Management. The journal will be accessed by the "Right Pages" electronic document browsing and alerting system developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories. During the first phase of the trial students and faculty members, using PC' s and workstations, will be able to search, read and print the full-page images of articlesincluding graphics and photographs.
After logging into the Right Pages system, users see an array of journal covers on their screen, similar to the display of periodicals in a library. To read a journal a current or back issue is selected, using a mouse, and the table of contents page is displayed. Articles in the issue are viewed by simply pointing to their entries in the table of contents. Journal issues can also be browsed page by page, and articles can be printed on demand on local laser printers.
To help people keep track of current publications, the Right Pages system will also alert them to newly published articles in subject areas in which they have registered an interest. Individual users can create personal-interest profiles that the system will use to search the contents of all incoming journals automatically. When articles matching a profile are found, the users are notified via electronic mail. The next time the user logs into the Right Pages system, these articles are highlighted for easy reference.
The first phase of the trial began in January of 1993. Succeeding phases will extend the availability of the electronic journal subscriptions to additional campuses in the UC system, and to other leading colleges and universities in the United States. UCSF and Bell Labs will also work together to extend and customise the Right Pages service to meet the speclfic needs of the university.
Yale pre-prints service is based on the idea that network users place abstracts of their preprints on the Yale computer for searching over the network, and that, once the required document has been located, users can access the host computer of the originator's university and download the pre-print for local reproduction. Here the urge is to combine the speed of the network with the existing organised submission of pre-prints by academics in order to overcome the frustrating delays through a 'prior to peer review' access system, which is in itself a form of peer review and market research.
The last example is another Springer initiative, the so-called "Springer Journals Preview Service", which started on the 1st March 1993. Thirty selected journals in the life sciences and radiology can be previewed via INTERNET ten days before the shipping of a new issue. Everyone with access to INTERNET can subscribe. Tables of contents are supplied free of charge and bibliographic information plus the author's abstract cost only $20 per calendar year per journal. The files are supplied in ASCII format, structured in accordance with accepted standards. They can be read on any computer without further processing and can easily be integrated into one's local database.

Types of electronic journals
There is a broad variety of electronic information services of which the electronic journal is only one element but it might well become the most important one in the future. Consequently, the first question to consider is: What are we talking about?, and, do we all have the same idea about an electronic journal? I am afraid not. So, in order to understand each other, we have to agree about the definition of an electronic journal. This is more difficult than one would expect at first sight.
A lot of possibdities need to be considered and frequently it is remarked in the literature that, there is, as yet, no tight definition simply because the electronic journal is still developing and is not yet a finished, well established product. One approach is to divide electronic journals on the basis of the transfer medium. Therefore we can currently identify the following types of electronic journals: CD-ROM journals + floppy disc journals + on-line journals/networked journals

CD-ROM journals
CD-ROM journals have been well known for many years now, for example "ADONIS", and they are, for the most part, journals which are also published in printed form. There is however also an example of a journal which began publica.tion as a desk top publishing venture in the 80's and is now being published on CD-ROM. This quarterly journal, Verbum Interactive, subtitled The Iournal of Personal Computer Aesthetics, features colour, sound, animations and music. It is available at a price of $49.95. Another new CD-ROM "journal", if one regards this as a journal, is Elsevier's Active Library on Corrosion: a joint effort between Elsevier Science Publishers and the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE). This CD-ROM product contains several "library sections", offering the user a typical hypermedia environment in which to create links from one section of ALC to another. The product has recently been described and tested from a user's point of view by Primich (1993).

Floppy disc journals
A few journals, mainly in the area of computing, are being published on floppy disc. They are mentioned in the literature.

On-line journals and networked journals
I personally consider these to be the "real electronic journals", if certain criteria have been met. These criteria are dealt with when I try to define such a journal.

Examples and definition of the "real" electronic journal
Most readers will probably have heard of the first electronic, full text with graphcs, peer-reviewed journal, The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, the product of a joint venture between the American Association for the Advancement of Science which developed the content and focus &d OCLC which distributes the journal on its network. The journal publishes medical findings within 48 hours after acceptance. Another, very recent example, is Elsevier's new product called Nuclear Physics Electronic. This initiative is still in the experimental stage with an initial test period of one year. It provides the subscriber with advance information about the contents of the printed journals Nuclear Physics A and Nuclear Physics B. However, it should be noted, that at present, access to abstracts and full text papers is available exclusively to readers at organisations which have a subscription to Nuclear Physics.

Science publishing over networks is represented by: Journal of Fluids Engineering; Modal Analysis; SOLSTICE; the Journal of Geography and Mathematics; ULAM Quarterly, and Hep-th (High Energy Particle Theory).
In attempting to formulate a definition, despite all the uncertainties and pitfalls in the development of the electronic journal, the underlying idea is that the electronic journal be defined in such a way as to be accepted by the academic community as a viable alternative to the printed journal. Therefore my definition would be: A primary scientific electronic journal is Unlike the printed journal there is no need for a planned schedule since the publication process is dependent only on the availability of refereed articles. There is obviously also no need for volume and issue numbers. Instead it is recommended that all articles be numbered chronologically. These numbers, combined with the ISSN, make it possible to create a world-wide system of unique electronic article numbers. For the sake of providing the user with an indication of the currency of the article, the date could be included in the number. You will have noticed that I disregard the technology used throughout the production process of the electronic journal. This was, in fact, the subject of a discussion at the IATUL Conference in Hamburg-Harburg. One of the questions was: "Is it essential that an electronic journal be produced f d y electronically and that the printed edition should have disappeared?". In my opinion it is not relevant to the issue. Of prime importance is the impact of the new technology on its users not on its producers and it is similarly important that one can only speak of an electronic journal if it is the first form in which the information is made available. Whether or not the publisher wishes to produce a printed journal and/or CD-ROM, or whatever other medium, at a later stage has no relevance when considering whether or not one can still speak about an electronic journal!

Electronic journal publishing
What is the current state of electronic journal publishing over networks? For the answer consult Strangelove and Kovac's major and ongoing creation the Directory of journals, newsletters and academic journal lists on the networks. The third edition of the Directo ry was put up for comment on INTERNET in March this year and contained 41 journals and 182 newsletters. Great care is taken in separating the two categories. Journals fall into three categories: humanities -26 (63%); science -11 (27%)) and 10% were difficult to categorise by subject. Among the "newsletters" subject categorisation is even more difficult but non-scientific newsletters were certainly in the majority. In addition to journals and newsletters there are the news groups of bulletin boards and very active computer conferences ("lists") on INTERNET are devoted to supporting the development of electronic scholarly publishing.
It is still true that electronic publishing has not yet been fully developed. Although the necessary technology has been available for some years there are many reasons for the slow start to electronic publishing.

W h y such a slow start?
The two main reasons are: + a conservative attitude of the publishers + the personal motivations of the researchers

The publishing industry
Academic publishing world-wide is a very fragmented industry in which 12,000 to 15,000 publishers are responsible for the creation of 50,000 -100,000 titles. Most of the publishers are involved in one or two journals, few exceed ten titles in the academic field. The bigger ones are well known, of course: Elsevier, Springer Verlag, Academic Press, Wiley, Blackwell Scientific and some of the bigger university presses. However, these publishers are a small proportion of the total. The academic publishing world is characterised as a classic "cottage industry" by David Brown and David Worlock in their study on network publishing: "most academic publishers have benefited from the low entrance costs to journal publishing and economies of scale are minimal. It is only in areas of access to finance and in international marketing where there are benefits from being large. In editorial and acquisition terms, where the quality of contacts is the important feature, small publishers can be as profitable in relative terms as their larger competitors". This explains the fad that it is a kind of industry which is cautious and does not, or hardly ever, invests in risky new information systems.
To some extent this approach is caused by the fact that the revenue available to invest in new electronic and telecommunications systems is less than is required. It was also shown in a study of the attitude of scholarly publishers to the adoption of new media that few publishers invested in the necessary planning activities (R&D, strategic planning, market research or new product development. This is why there were (are) only a few publishing houses working on new services such as electronic and network publishing and assessing the impact of them on traditional pnnrer-on-paper services.
'fhere are, however, as indicated in my introduction, some exceptions to this general picture of a conservative industry. Elsevier & Springer Verlag, as the two leading European publishers, and a dozen other commercial European publishers represent the basis of the European industry. A similar number of society journal publishers represents the equivalent in the USA. Although these companies have experimented, and still do, this is only done on a small scale because of the fear that investment in new technology will not be cost-effective. There is even a fear that it will have an adverse effect on the finalcial situation of the printed journal.
Under these circumstances a proactive strategy towards electronic publishing systems is not popular with publishers. It is more attractive to monitor the developments in libraries and in the field of subscription agents and to be reactive.
So it is obvious that the publishers have their own concerns, as they worry that the new possibilities of electronic networking will eventually erode their market. There is no doubt, however, that to overcome this threat they will have to read decisively in the very near future.

The researchers
The second main reason for the slow start of electronic serial publishing is the personal motivations of the authors/researchers.
Since the authors are both the producers and the consumers of the information, their attitude to electronic publishing is the most important factor in the process of moving from the printed journal to the electronic one. Therefore it is very important to understand the motivation that causes them to publish in the first place. There appear to be four main reasons: This means, in my opinion, that the acceptance of the real electronic journal will be quite different amongst the different disciplines. Those disciplines which are used to working with PCs will move to the use of electronic journals much earlier than researchers from disciplines that hardly use PCs.

Why will it accelerate?
I Having explained why electronic journals have had such a slow start, I will now describe the + improved networking (capacity and usage) + library budget constraints + electronic document delivery/current awareness service

Improved networking
A couple of hundred years ago, subscriptions to the printed journal grew in number only as the postal service of those days became more reliable and regular. Consequently networking is one of the most important developments in electronic information transfer. We should realise also that networking, and more generally, the information industry that will stimulate the electronic journal, are dependent on the development of many other technologies, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1. Technologies that have an impact on electronic information in the 1990s
High-speed data network, ISDN rl In all parts of the world one can see the rapid development of (interlnational (research)networks of which the following are some striking examples.
In the USA the vice-president has a proven record of interest in the information infrastructure and technology. It started after the approval of the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. As a part of this legislation INTERNET forms the basis for a National Research and Education Network. In fact it is not so much a network as a network program to expand and improve INTERNET. After this Act Senator A1 Gore introduced his "Information Infrastructure and Technology Act" in July 1992. The bill was approved at the end of 1992 and authorises a total of $1.15 billion over the next five years to ensure that the technology developed by the High-Performance Computing Ad of 1991 is applied widely in education, health care, industry and libraries!
The promises of electronic publishing are also beginning to be realised on BITNET, a noncommercial computer network that links over 3,000 computers in 35 countries. BITNET has gateways that connect it with other large, non-Australia has AARNET: the Australian Research Network, and the list could continue with networks in other countries.
From this overview we can conclude that networks are developed or developing all over the world and that the performance of those networks will drastically improve in the richer countries during the years to come. So the "postal service" that was needed some hundred years ago for the growth of the paper journals can now be replaced by the "network service" for the growth of the electronic journals.

Libra y budgeta y constraints
The second reason why publishers are under pressure to speed up electronic journals are the constraints on library budgets .
Further detail on this is hardly necessary because these constraints have been a general experience in recent years. In ARL libraries over the years 1986 -1991 fewer monograph volumes were purchased (-15%) by these libraries and also slightly fewer serial titles (-2%). This figure for serials is even worse since the number of serial titles is still growing from year to year (figure 2). commercial networks, like INTERNET. There is a growing number of electronic newsletters and journals on the network, most of the journals being founded in 1990-91.
In the UK JANET, a packet switched Joint Academic Network established in 1984, now connects over 100,000 academic users in the UK. Much of the network has been upgraded to operate at 2 Mbps, and work is in progress to develop SUPER JANET, a fibre optic broadband network operating at up to 100 Mbps with the ultimate goal of transmission at 1,000 Mbps.
SURFnet in The Netherlands is developing from originally a purely academic network into a more open network, with its next upgrade already being planned. There is a steady decrease in what the company identifies as their "core journals". It also illustrates that the newly launched journals are the ones which are growing but only at a very low level and after about 5-10 years these numbers start dropping as well. These findings clearly indicate that Elsevier has to diversify its products in the near future.

Figure 3: Trends in subscriptions to Elsevier journals
Year I

Electronic document delivery
The third and last of the main reasons for the speeding-up in the growth of electronic journals is the dramatic developments in the area of electronic document delivery. Electronic document delivery and current awareness services are, without any doubt, the most exciting, dynamic and perhaps controversial aspects of the STM information business in the early 1990's. They represent the solution for those libraries suffering under increasingly difficult financial circumstances but at the same time pose a real threat to the commercial viability of the very journal of which this new service depends on.
To give you an idea of the key recent developments which reflect the extent and nature of activities in the field of electronic document delivery, I have reproduced data prepared and made available to me by David Brown of DJB Associates. The information shows the situation in summer 1993, so it can be considered reasonably up to date. Figure 4 shows the timing of the new services from which it is apparent that there was an explosion of activities in this field at the beginning of this year.

Figure 4: Date of the launch of new semices
As a measure of the coverage offered by each service, figure 5 shows the number of serial titles included in the service. All these new services will undoubtedly result in an increase in individual article supply. It is also to be expected that there will be a further drop in the total number of serial subscriptions. The resulting trend is a shift from expenditure on serials to expenditure on IAS and the medium term effect of this trend in document delivery world-wide is enormous if we assume a growth rate in document supply from 15% in 1993 to 20 percent in 1998. By 1998 the document supply business will represent half of the subscription business!

Effects on the traditional information chain
The last part of my article deals with the impact of the new electronic information services, and especially the electronic journal, on the traditional information chain which in its most simple form still consists of authors+publishers+subscription agents+libraries+readers (who in many cases are authors as well).

Authors
As already stated, authors have their own personal reasons for publishing. The creation of the electronic journal, as such, does not need to have an impact on the authors apart from the fact that they will be asked (forced) more and more to deliver the draft article in a very specific way prescribed by the publisher. So there will be less freedom of text delivery.
A further point to note is the widely held view that the new technology offers an opportunity for universities to assume greater control over the publishing process and to diminish the role of commercial publishers. In this situation authors will have to re-think their present "give away" attitude to copyright.

Publishers
Much has been said about the future changes that will take place in the field of publishing. I share the views as presented in a recent article by Karen Hunter, Elsevier's Vice President, in which she predicts some general trends that both publishers and librarians will experience in the next decade: + it will get worse before it gets better; + there will be new electronic entrants who take sigmficant new roles as intermediaries in scientific communication; * libraries and publishers will be squeezed further + scientist will not go much out of their way to assist us if we fail to deliver needed services but they will emerge to be net winners in the next decade. She concludes her article by suggesting four imperatives for scientific journal publishers "who want to service this next decade". + Get your material in standardised, distributable (SGML) electronic form. The successful publisher will start with standardised electronic files, from which both the paper and electronic versions can be created. These views are confirmed in a confidential internal strategic planning report for the Academic Publishg Division Elsevier for the years 1993-1997. In this report the conclusion is drawn that they are dependent on one product, the journal, and on one client group, libraries.  For these reasons Elsevier will speed up implementation of digital dissemination of scientific information making available the shifts in the market shown in figure 6, which should be the basis for the fourth point of Karen Hunter's imperatives, "learn to be flexible in products and prices", It is clear that, if the publisher moves towards electronic journals, the role of the subscription agent will disappear in the information chain.

Markets: main shifts
Probably the publishers will try to reach the reader directly by bypassing the library. This means that the role of the library could diminish as well.

Subscription agents
"The changing role of a subscription agent" was the title of a paper presented last year by David Sidebottom, Managing Director Faxon Europe, during the Second European Serials Conference. After describing the role of the subscription agent and discussing changes and new opportunities, he concluded that "the way the agent is fulfilling its role is definitely changing but so are those of the publisher and librarian. The services I have mentioned to date, including document delivery, are by no means the end of the line as agents continue to explore new ground, be it information gateways or perhaps providing navigating tools through the maze of electronic media".
I can only agree that the agents have really explored new ground and I tend to believe that they form the part of the information chain that has most markedly crossed their traditional boundary within that chain. It is inevitable that this will cause tension between agents and the publishers on the one hand and the librarians on the other. The key issue of course is the question of copyright and the different purpose for which they deliver articles compared with libraries, i.e. for-profit versus not-for-profit! I expect that their new business will be monitored closely by the publishers. If they provide this service cheaper and better than the libraries can, I do not expect much conflict with librarians.

Libraries
I will not go into detail about the position of the library because this was the topic of a paper by Hazel Woodward reproduced in this issue of

Gerard van h4arle Electronic Serials Publishing
Serials. I merely wish to reiterate that, as with the publishers, there is a real threat that the electronic journal will eliminate the role of the library or will at least change it.

Readers
As Karen Hunter expects, readers will probably be the part of the chain that can profit most from the possibilities of the electronic journal. Their situation will only change with regard to the payment for electronic services, if they want to bypass the library from personal preference. Readers will of course be forced, if they want to benefit at large from the electronic journal, to create their own personal electronic library on their PCs, replacing the existing paper based personal documentation systems. This implies a further need for personal retrieval and storage software.
Another effect will be a reduction in the number of visits to the library and the potential danger of loosing the advantages and results of browsing. Finally, as mentioned before, reading will be restricted to PC-based workplaces. However, I expect a growth in the use of portable PCs which will reduce this potential disadvantage.
As a summary of the possible changes in the t~aditional information chain figure 7 is a combination of data from Merriman (1992) and Schauder (1993).