APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Platform

Byte by Byte

Jon Dorbolo

The exchange of academic knowledge depends on scholarly publication. This literature is almost entirely in printed paper form. The article and monograph have not been succeeded by television as has the newspaper and novel. The Internet, on the other hand, is the child of academia. Scholars, teachers, and students who may shun other electronic media are active players and developers online. So, there is potential for online media to take on the traditional roles of print publication. There is also a need for online publication to succeed. Academia must move its discourse online because print publications are no longer effective for wide-scale scholarly communication. Yet, the academic community does not acknowledge electronic publication as equivalent in value to print publication. This discourages submissions to online journals, which fuels the devaluation of online publications. To escape this degenerate orbit, we must make two improvements in electronic publication: usability and authority.

Crisis

The problem with print is economic. Since the 1970s libraries have spent more of their money to acquire fewer materials. Library acquisition budgets have generally decreased as a percentage of university budgets, while new book and periodical offerings have steadily increased. More devastating than budget allocation is the reduced buying power that the library budget now has. Book and periodical costs have climbed relentlessly. Science and technical journal subscription rates increased at 11.3 percent per year from 1970 to 1990.¹ Humanities periodical costs have risen as well, but at a much lower pace. Still, just to subscribe to Ethics, Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy will cost an institution $264 this year. Episteme Links lists 351 philosophy-related journals and newsletters. It is impossible for libraries to keep pace with the volume and cost of print literature. This gap between library acquisitions and new publications and the effects of rising journal costs on library budgets is what librarians are calling "the serials crisis."

The economics of print literature creates uneven access to scholarly writing. Materials sharing agreements are a help, yet they are not enough. Moving print materials around is labor- and facilities-intensive. The harder it is to get relevant articles and books, the more division is created in traditionally unified fields. The less available the texts become, the more disjointed the conversations. Given the priority of the sciences in universities; "science journals account for approximately 29 percent of the total number of serials but 65 percent of the serials budget"²; scholarly philosophy is acutely impacted.

Solution

The negative impact of print economics on libraries and scholars can be solved by electronic publication. Putting journals online reduces cost and increases access radically. Online journal publication (eJournal) is the means of solving the serials crisis and has numerous benefits to the academic community.

Cost

Two key factors in the increase of print publication prices are the cost of paper and the growth of sophisticated publishing techniques, such as graphics. Electronic publication resolves both. This newsletter began using graphics and text pulls (the larger-font quotes fragments inserted into the text body) two years ago. These enhancements are not difficult to create, but they lead to higher printing costs. Color graphics would be a further advance, but the production costs and environmental costs argue against it. In electronic publishing, quality graphics do not add to the cost of production, though they add to the demands for creating the material. Electronic journals will offer high production-value imagery, animation, video, and simulations without running up subscription prices.

Access

The distribution of print media is a function of the number of copies and locations supporting them. Electronic media distributes to many from a single source. One server can supply all the readers of numerous journals. The readership may grow without affecting the production process. Journal subscription may include back issues as a matter of course. Access to scholarly literature is significantly enhanced by electronic publishing.

EJournals are portable. Traveling scholars have access to their subscriptions and library offerings at the nearest online terminal, which may soon be anywhere/anytime wireless. Ready access to sources affects the academic conversation. At a recent APA meeting session a disagreement arose over whether Locke actually used a particular phrasing. The session commentator flipped up his laptop, ran a search on the text of Locke’s essay and found three instances of that phrase. Point went to the defender.

Time

Electronic publishing will affect the pace of academic communication. Layout, printing, and shipping are centralized processes and take significant time in the publication process. It is not uncommon for more than a year to pass between an author’s submission of an article and the shelving of the journal. Replies to articles can be years apart requiring an anthology to pull the parts together into an overall presentation. There is no prima facie reason why increasing the pace of scholarship is desirable, and some common experience counts against it (i.e., most of us already have too much to do in too little time). Yet, bringing more immediacy into the publishing process encourages scholars to address topical issues. I have heard of a case where a philosopher wrote about a current matter and submitted the article to a journal. Well over a year later the journal rejected the article with the comment that the issue was no longer topical. There are matters of philosophical concerns that do not suit the pace of journal publication. Electronic publishing can reduce the turnaround time significantly, especially when submissions are received in the required formats.

Management

eJournals will provide strong management capabilities to individuals. The ability to search across an entire corpus of full texts, not just bibliographies and abstracts, transforms research. Electronic journals will allow Internet robots to seek articles related to relevant topics and constantly update a table of contents in those areas. Netscape and Yahoo offer personalized pages in which the individual manages the sources and topics of the daily news. Applied to academic journals, this selectivity will make scholars more informed and effective. Noesis already allows for one-time selectivity in the search <noesis.evansville.edu/>. Sustainable personalization is not far off. Given the potential benefit and technical inevitability of such an approach to scholarship, it is quite important to take concerns about the effect of search logic on the nature of knowledge seriously. For instance, the issues as raised by Michael Heim in "Computer Search Logic."³

Discussion

Journals in the online media affect scholarship by transforming every article into a potential discussion. Socrates observed that texts create intellectual distance between reader and writer. He tells Phaedrus that written words "seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever" (Phaedrus, 521d). Online discussion media (e-mail, threaded discussion) transform passive, static texts into living discourse. Every online journal and article should have comment areas in which critics, defenders, and authors may carry on the matter of the text. These contemporary objections and replies will have to be stylized and may become part of a new genre of academic prose. The journal editor’s role should grow to include moderating the discussion on the article or review.

Prospects

Making eJournals a standard for scholarship is crucial to the quality of research institution libraries and the health of academic conversation. Given the low cost and wide distribution, one wonders why journals have not moved online already. Two factors dominate in the reluctance to take this needed step: readability and authority.

To be functional as replacements for paper texts, the eBook must be ergonomically designed and very readable. Scrolling makes it difficult for many readers to follow the flow of the text. Several eBooks improve readability over the computer monitor by eliminating scrolling in favor of fixed page displays. Most important is the resolution of the text. Present CRT and LCD monitors display type that is quite inferior to most printed type. It is possible to simply print out the text and smart Web design provides optimally printable versions of text. But, the value of the eText is far beyond being a step in the printing process. To realize this value, eText must be very readable. Progress in the readability of eText is appearing due to sub-pixel font rendering. This method uses the component areas of individual pixels to smooth out the edges of the lettering. Each pixel on the screen is composed of three sub-pixels: red, green, and blue. The visual system mixes these three primary colors in combination to form all the visible color combinations including black and white. Each sub-pixel can be controlled to have a cumulative effect on the visible object. This method allows the production of lines and curves that have 300 percent more resolution that current whole-pixel rendering. This produces a much more solid, high-contrast, and readable text. This goes a long way to make eBooks more readable, though this technique clearly does not make eText comparable to print text. In viewing the demonstrations of this technique, I find the text to be better than existing CRT output, but it appears fuzzy rather than sharp. To make the wholesale shift to eText we will need text rendering that is darn near perfect. For demonstrations and explanations of this technology see Steve Gibson’s pages at www.grc.com/freeandclear.htm and Microsoft ClearType™ press releases at www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/default.htm.

Challenge

The most important factor in the evolution of the eJournal is its acceptance into the formal academic process. Very important is the acknowledgment by departments and colleges of eJournal publication as legitimate research. Peer review may be a requisite factor in this acceptance. Endorsement by the APA for qualified eJournals is another. A current study and position paper from the APA on electronic publication is needed.

All authors should continue to entrust their work to the paper journals of their choice. But if, in addition, they were to publicly archive their pre-refereeing preprints and then their post-refereeing reprints on-line on their Home Servers, for free for all, then the de facto practices of the reader community would take care of the rest (irrespective of their reservations about bed/bath/beach reading); library serial cancellations, the collapse of the paper card house, publisher perestroika, and a free for all, e-only serial corpus financed by author-end page charges would soon follow suit.⁴

Authors need to take the leap of faith to publish online now. The present need is to build the body of quality online literature. Each quality online journal lends credibility to electronic academic publication overall. This includes rejected work, since a traditional measure of journal authority is its rejection rate. If every concerned philosopher/scholar will submit a single article to existing online journals in the next year, the impact will be visible and the venue will grow. Harnad’s proposal is worth consideration as well. Established journals will become interested in the medium, just as commercial publishers have embraced it after long distance. The eJournal venue will grow, byte by byte.

3. S. Harnad, "University Libraries and Scholarly Communication," in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, ed. R. Peck and G. B. Newby (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 103–118.

4. S. Harnad, "On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls," Nature 395 (1998): 127–128. www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html