Conclusions

This dissertation looked to explore the extent of the electronic, independent scholarly journal, and by implication to examine whether such a journal is feasible and how it affects the scholarly publishing model.

Having looked at all the results, I feel that there are three models of free electronic journal publishing emerging. The niche market model, the vanity publishing model and the commercial model.

The Niche Market model

For specialised subjects with a small potential readership, it is too expensive to start up a paper journal, especially as the readership may be spread globally. Here, the low costs associated with setting up a Web journal means that increased specialism is possible, for example I have found journals on pentecostal/charismatic research, ancient theatre and vedic studies. These journals tend to be run by academics or individuals, have a fairly low readership, but be fairly confident about reaching a reasonable proportion of their intended audience. A reply to my questionnaire from the e-journal Theory and Applications of Categories stated that "... there are only a few hundred people who might be able to read articles in the journal, and I suspect that most of them do look at the contents page from time to time." As a result of this specialised closed audience, the image and prestige of the journal is not too important, as there will be little or no competition. The communication function is here just as important as validation. A couple of examples from those that gave information in my survey that fit this category are the Journal of Buddhist Ethics and Semper Reformanda. Both these journals have quite specialised subject matter and subscriber numbers which are comparable with their hit rates, meaning that if they have 2000 subscribers then their monthly hit rates are about 2000, giving the impression (and it is only an assumption, because the figures do not measure who is reading) that the size of the group that looks at the journal is approximately the same size as that which subscribes, and that maybe they are the same. This is in contrast to a journal like Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, which has 276 times as many hits as subscribers, implying a large audience who look at it now and again, but do not want to be kept up to date with it.

The Vanity Publishing model

The purpose of these journals is to generally just to publish papers. However, there are other reasons for starting a journal, for example as "a great way to network ourselves within the academic communities we were going to be joining professionally." (e-mail reply from Enculturation). They do not particularly need to attract funding to survive as they rely on their institution which tends to pay for the editors time and equipment, albeit indirectly. Again these sorts of journals are published mostly by academics, and the low cost of Web publishing is attractive. These are the journals whose owners do not think that it is worth it to collect any statistics on readership, except for reasons of pure interest, as the quote from the Journal of Electronic Publishing, in the discussion of the readership results, illustrates. The subject matter often tends to coincide with areas of interest of established print journals, for example history or biology, but with no real effort to compete for readers. Because of the minimal funding, little time can be spent on the journal to improve the image and attract readers to sustain the journal. As a result, this type of journal is most likely to die. 70% of the journals that had not published an article since 1.1.98 were run by academics, while academics were responsible for only 54% of the journals that were still alive.

The Commercial model

The owners of these journals have an eye to attracting funding from external sources, for example advertising or subscription charges, moving away from relying on their parent institution. They are keenly aware of their readership and devising ways to determine it more accurately. As I mentioned in the discussion of the results from the readership survey, of the three journals implementing a password login that replied to my survey, two of the respondents told me that their data was commercially sensitive - implying that they intended to use it, maybe to attract advertising. Advertising has been used on some of the journals (I did not count the number of sites accurately, but I estimate the number of journals of those I found, using some sort of advertising to be around 20-30) in different ways, ranging from sponsorship (Molecular Vision), to banners and links (Electronic Journal of Biotechnology). For example, amazon.com give commission to IDEA journal if someone buys books after following a link from their site. It is in their interests to spend time improving the marketing and image of the journal to become attractive to advertisers. Most of these journals are published by learned societies or professional associations, and other companies. In an e-mail response from the Journal of Conceptual Modeling (run by a database design company), I was told that one of the reasons for the journal was to attract custom: "I don't think the web is a viable advertising tool without something to draw users. In our case, it's information."

Not all journals fit exactly into one of these three categories, there are some successful, widely read, non-commercial electronic journals, but these are the exception rather than the rule. The high death rate of electronic journals, and slowing growth I have found, implies that the commercial journal publishers, such as Elsevier, Blackwell etc. will use the time to their advantage and regain their controlling position.

The future...

So having identified these three models, how do I think that each will evolve, and are any of them a viable scholarly publishing model? The niche market journals fulfil a need for highly specialised publishing which is not met by the current printed journals, so I can see a future for them, as long as they have the support of the community they are publishing for. However, the vanity publishing and commercial journals are trying to exist alongside the current major publishers, and win readers from them. Readers will only read a certain amount. Bearing in mind that all current printed journals will soon be in electronic form, although probably accessible by subscription only - "Reed-Elsevier now has more than 1,200 journals online, Springer has 360, and Academic Press 174. A journal without a web version is now rare, and probably endangered" (Butler, 1999), the electronic journals need to be able to differentiate themselves in such a way that they can compete with the ready made reputation and branding of established print journals. Without any distinguishing features, electronic journals will never attain the critical mass of papers needed to become successful. The commercial model journals will be able to get money from advertisers, sponsors or subscribers to invest in better design, linking, marketing etc. to compete, while journals following the vanity publishing model, will need to justify greater expenditure to their institutions.

As viable scholarly publishing models, the niche market model improves on the current situation in the highly specialised subjects it serves, by improving communication and author recognition, however I feel that the vanity model does not get a wide enough readership, or mass of papers to say that it fulfils either of those roles. The need to attract readers in the commercial model is an incentive for a journal to build up a reputation and a wide audience.

I am not sure if the journal model of many different titles, all with regular issues is the way forward anyway. I think that the concept may be outdated when we do not have to print articles on paper and then send them through the Royal Mail. To me, the journal concept seems to be about packaging and marketing, making readers aware of new papers, and designing an environment to hold them which reassures the reader of their accuracy and importance. The Internet can offer new ways for communication, away from the serial, collated, page limited print journal, to a growing archive of papers, published as and when ready, with no limit on length, or additional information such as pictures, video and sound. It seems to be widely agreed that peer review will remain the method of choice for validation, despite experiments with other forms of validation such as "interactive vote" (Nadasdy, 1997), but this does not need to be done in a journal environment. Separate journal titles are a way of dividing research into ever smaller sections so that a manageable number of pages can be printed for each journal. With electronic publishing, the page limit is removed, and the need for distinct journals is lessened. It could be possible to have an archive of papers, either regional, national or global, in the same subject area. This is one of the arguments for the Scholar's Forum proposal (Buck et al., 1999), which I discussed here.

Being realistic, without some kind of incentive, e.g. from learned societies or university consortia, this will not happen in the short term. Purists will say that there is no need for a commercial element to journal publication, and they may be right, but not in the current market with the need to compete against the established print publishers. Only if the market changes, for example by devolving journal purchase budgets to academic departments or whole academic communities getting together to start something like Ginsparg's xxx preprint server, will free, non-commercial (i.e. relying for funding solely on the institution responsible) scholarly publishing be viable. Without such a change, in the future I see "one-stop shops" for particular subjects, with a mixture of free and paid for journals (or article servers), together with other related services, controlled by commercial outfits. Maybe the journals themselves will be published by academics, but they will rely on the branding of the commercial umbrella to attract readers. Butler (1999) sees the publishers heading towards this model as well, because "the competitive edge of publishers is increasingly coming to depend on their ability to muster a critical mass of attractive information through a single powerful and user-friendly interface."

This subject is a fascinating one, and there are lots of areas left that need further investigation. In particular, looking further in depth at funding of these journals, the motivations behind them, and the definitions that the editors have of "success" as related to their journals. Also it would be interesting to look at how the big publishers and learned societies are tackling electronic publishing. I did not include in this study learned societies who put their journals online for the benefit of their members only, for example the Institute of Physics, American Physical Society etc., but for academics working in those areas, these would also be an important source of information.

References

Butler, D. (1999). "The writing is on the Web for science journals in print", Nature, 397, 195-200.

Exploring the development of the independent, electronic, scholarly journal, by Alison Wells
MSc in Information Management, 1998/1999
Electronic Dissertations Library
© University of Sheffield - Department of Information Sudies (All Rights Reserved)