Disintermediation of Academic Publishing through the Internet: An Intermediate Report from the Front

Line

Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Simeon M. Warner http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/simeon/

Nature of this talk

• intermediate report • Interaction welcome, ample time• Done by pioneer (Krichel) and practitioner

(Warner)• Normative rather than positive emphasis• listen to the horse’s mouth• descriptive and speculative parts

The Internet threat

• Internet is a relatively recent technology that threatens all sorts of businesses whose essential function is to provide an intermediary between different parties

• these include estate agents, marital agencies, academic publishers

Esoteric authors

• An academic has little change but big ego.– No monetary reward for writings, therefore optimal

for authors to allow free access.– But big ego only satisfied with quality certification.

• Social optimum reached when price is equal to marginal cost.

• Unclear if free access can become a reality

Problems for toll-gate publishers

• Static demand for material by libraries leads to upward spiral prices to raise profits.

• Remedy is pricing per customer and consortia deals.

• Risk of a downward spiral where poor dissemination may detract best authors away to alternative venues.

Alternative venues on Internet

• Homepage on the web• Some isolated Internet publishing venture

(budding electronic journals) • Institutional multidisciplinary archive• Formal internet archiving and dissemination

venues, essentially limited to the preprint disciplines.

The preprint disciplines• Some few disciplines have had a tradition of

informal publication through – preprints– working papers and tech reports

• These are – Computing– Economics– Mathematics– Physics

Centralised and decentralised model

discipline centralised decentralised• Computing CORR NCSTRL• Economics EconWPA RePEc• Mathematics arXiv MathNet• Physics arXiv PhysNet

and then there is the web...

arXiv

• Oldest (1991) and best-known author self-archiving system

• in fact the essence of an author self-archiving system– authors upload papers to a centralised system– the centralised system itself is mirrored

• founded by Paul Ginsparg at LANL

History• Mail exchange (August 1991)• ftp server (1992)• web interface (December 1993)• automatic PostScript generation from TeX

source (June 1995)• PDF generation (April 1996)• web upload (June 1996)• OAI interface (February 2000)

Statistics for 2000• 70,000 users in over 100 countries• 13,000,000 downloads of papers• 30,000 submissions • 3,500 additional new submissions per annum• Over 98% of submissions are entirely auto-mated: 68%

via the web, 27% via email and 5% via ftp.• arXiv uses less than one full-time equivalent to deal

with day-to-day operations.

Special strengths of arXiv

• Simple to understand concept• Usage of TeX document formatting system• indefinite funding horizon thanks to NSF and US

DoE• strong community support (e.g. volunteer

moderators)

(minor) Weaknesses of arXiv

• Its model failed on other discipline-based attempts – cogprints– EconWPA– CORR

• not as well integrated as possible with other sources

• lack of important innovation in past few years

RePEc

• Comprehenisive academic self-documentation system

• in fact, the very essence of an academic self-documentation system– run decentrally by academic volunteers – comprehensive picture of academic output activity

• originates with WoPEc project founded by Thomas Krichel in 1993

RePEc principle

• Many archives – archives offer metadata about digital objects (mainly working

papers)• One database

– The data from all archives forms one single logical database despite the fact that it is held on different servers.

• Many services – users can access the data through many interfaces. – providers of archives offer their data to all interfaces at the

same time. This provides for an optimal distribution.

RePEc is based on 190+ archives

• WoPEc• EconWPA• DEGREE• S-WoPEc• NBER• CEPR

• US Fed in Print• IMF• OECD• MIT• University of Surrey• CO PAH

…to form one dataset...• over 140,000 items in over 1,000 series, contains

working paper, published paper, software, personal and institutional data

• largest distributed free source about online scientific publications, over 45,000 electronic papers

• data is encoded using the purpose-built ReDIF format• all archives follow a convention called the Guildford

protocol on how to store ReDIF files and other data on their servers. Therefore the archives can be mirrored.

RePEc is used in many services

• BibEc and WoPEc• Decomate Z39.50 service• NEP: New Economics Papers• Inomics• EconPapers• Ecommunics

• IDEAS• RuPEc• EDIRC• HoPEc

… describes documentsTemplate-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal PolicyAuthor-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-06-

05:thomas_krichelAuthor-Email: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: P.Levine@surrey.ac.uk Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of SurreyClassification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/

pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdfCreation-Date: 199603 Revision-Date: 199711 Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… describes persons (HoPEc)Template-Type: ReDIF-Person 1.0 Name-Full: KRICHEL, THOMAS Name-First: THOMAS Name-Last: KRICHEL Postal: 1 Martyr Court 10 Martyr Road Guildford GU1 4LF EnglandEmail: t.krichel@surrey.ac.ukHomepage: http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.ukWorkplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desurukAuthor-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:conceptsAuthor-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIFHandle: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:THOMAS_KRICHEL

… describes institutions (EDIRC)

Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of SurreyPrimary-Location: GuildfordSecondary-Name: Department of EconomicsSecondary-Phone: (01483) 259380Secondary-Email: economics@surrey.ac.ukSecondary-Fax: (01483) 259548Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XHSecondary-Homepage: http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

Weaknesses of RePEc• No funding• Difficult to grasp innovative concepts

– relational database for the academic process– plethora of user and contributor services

• testing out concept in other discipline with to date limited results (ReLIS). Setting-up costs are large.

• Little support from the top of the academic food chain

Think forward...

• Optimisation over time involves finding the best path that leads to the desired outcome.

• That is the essence of Bellman’s principle of intertemporal optimality.

• Therefore a realistic desired outcome has to be fixed first.

Think British...

• Extreme scenarios are unlikely• Slow evolution• Totally free access to scholarly documents

unlikely • Budding initiatives of free quality-controlled

journals shows that academics can do “it” themselves

One size does not fit all...

• There are important discipline-specific differences in scholarly communication that are likely to persist in the rise of Internet-mediated scholarly communication.

• This can already be demonstrated on current initiatives, all of which have a discipline anchoring.

• (talk about institutional archiving later)

Disciplines differ...

• communication patterns before Internet• presence or absence of entrepreneurial pioneers• rewards systems• sensitivity and contestitivity of material

but all will have a free layer and a toll-gated layer

Scenario 1: vacuum cleaner

• Free academic layer dispersed and available with all the rest of the web.

• Toll-gated material much more quality controlled• no free bibliographical database• Scenario defended by Bill Arms. • Impossible to build scholarly communication system

on the free layer alone. • Default scenario.

Scenario 2: trainspotter

• Organised, decentralised free layer, separatable from the web.

• Toll-gated layer of quality-controlled final publications.

• Both layers interoperate through a shared free bibliographical database.

• Scenario as in RePEc and OAI.

Scenario 3: Gosplan

• One central archive for the discipline with much of the papers available on it.

• Peer-review running as overlay to the central archive.

• Scenario of ArXiv.

Suggestion to move forward

• Concentrate on the provision of contents. Don’t waste so much time on – metadata schemes (adopt AMF)– user interfaces

• Use OAI protocols to export contents.• Shift focus of attention away from works towards

the persons who create the works.

Conclusion

When a technological shock (like the Internet) hits a social structure (like the scholarly communication system), then there is an opportunity for new entrants to come along.

This opportunity is here today. Seize it. Thank you for listening.