Non-academics may find it worth ignoring the 'publish-or-perish' setting,
and reading it anyway, because it has implications for e-publishing in
general.
______________________________________________________________________________
Dear Rick,
This is a longish response to your inquiry about the ways that
academic review committees now consider articles that have
been published in refereed e-journals.
We have found alot of confusion in discussions about the use of
electronic media in scholarly communication that makes it
harder for scholars, editors, administrators, publishers,
librarians, etc. to sort out some of the key behavioral and policy
issues.
Unfortunately, your note reflects some of the confusing
claims/perceptions & misinformation that circulates in the
numerous and varied discussions of electronic scholarly
publishing.
"A recent PBS "Life on the Internet" indicated that
genetics researchers share and disseminate data and
results electronically instead of publication in a print
journal."
If the PBS show reported geneticists' publishing behavior in
terms like these, it's a subtle misrepresentation that adds to the
confusions. Since 1994, I've been doing field studies of
scholarly publishing with Lisa Covi (1994-96) and Geoff
McKim (1997--). We've interviewed geneticists in 10
universities (as well as researcher/scholars in other fields, incl.
other lab sciences, social sciences, and humanistic disciplines).
In brief, some genetic researchers do share some kinds of data
electronically the data is usually DNA sequences and a corpus
of supporting materials (such as citations to paper journal
articles that report the sequencing, the availability of enzymes to
facilittae the lab work, and so on.) These sequences are usually
posted for integration into organism-specific online-databases,
such as Flybase (for those who study fruit flies) and the Human
Genome Database (GDB, http://gdbwww.gdb.org/). There was a
paper precursor to Flybase ("the Redbook"), but having results
recorded in it was not a form of scholarly publication that was in
any way equivalent to journal publication.
Top geneticists try to publish their research (in which DNA
sequences may be reported) in high-quality high-visibility
journals, such as Science, Nature and Cell. These have
established their standards of quality, and readership as pure
paper journals, Recently, these paper journals have also been
distributed in electronic form (ie., Science Online --
www.sciencemag.org). We refer to them as p-e "hybrid"
journals, because they are still primarily distributed as paper
journals and derive their legitimacy from their paper journal
practices.
There are significant distinctions between pure electronic
journals -- journals that are distributed primarily in electronic
form, and the hybrid paper-electronic journals. In much of the
discourse on scholarly communication, these two very disparate
venues are conflated into "electronic journals". This distinction
must be kept in mind when reading accounts of the supposed
rapid (exponential?) growth of electronic journals.
Today, the differences between pure e-journals and e-p and p-e
hybrids is *not* simply their distribution medium, but also the
extent to which they are integrated into the larger scholarly
corpus by being abstracted (say in ABI/INFORM, PsychInfo or
Medline), and also archived for long-term accessibility in
research libraries.
In Biology, for example, most biologists neither read nor
publish in The World Wide Web Journal of Biology, a pure
(peer-reviewed) electronic journal.
Genetics researchers generally do NOT publish their own
research reports in pure electronic journals, nor do they post
them on their personal home pages in advance of paper
publication. Nor do they extensively distribute pre-publication
copies of working papers electronically.
Even high energy physicists, for example, who often submit
their research reports to working paper servers (such as the
E-Print server at Los Alamos, http://xxx.lanl.gov) at time of
submission of article to a journal, still fight to get these very
articles published in high-impact paper journals such as Physical
Review and Physical Review Letters. There are now hybrid p-e
versions of some of these journals (incl. MISQ Archivist) but
they are anchored in a paper journal world.
There are some refereed pure e-journals in several disciplines,
and they may well grow in number and vitality. But their
number and perceived quality is hard to discern when they are
casually lumped together with p-e journals.
There are, important subdisciplinary differences in the extent to
which researchers are willing to make full articles available
online (such as between high-energy physics and astrophysics).
We also note major differences between fields such as
high-energy physics and computer science, which generally
support the full posting of full research reports long before
accceptance for paper publication, and the policies of the
American Chemical Society and the American Psychological
Association, which sternly warn their members not to post any
article from the earliest stages as a working paper through post
publication after acceptance in a disciplinary journal.
There is a great deal of controversy and confusion which we are
trying to sort out ourselves, in terms of the research and
communicative practices of various disciplines.
We have begun to examine these issues in our writing, see for
example: "Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media in the
Systems of Scholarly Communication" Rob Kling and Lisa
Covi. The Information Society 11(4)(1995): 261-271
(http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/klingej2.html).
We are working on a policy paper about the ways that
publication can/should be viewed as part of scholaly
communication (the abstract is provided at the end of this note,
and a brief prospectus of the field work is available at
http://www.kiva.net/~mckimg/personal/SCIT2/scit2des.html).
This work also builds on previous research done by Rob Kling
and Lisa Covi on the use of information technology in scholarly
work practices (a prospectus is available at
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/~kling/scitann.html).
Our personal view is that academic reviewers (at all levels),
should allow the articles that are published in pure e-journals to
be included in personnel reviews. There are serious questions
about how to evaluate the quality of any article (paper or
electronic) based on an assessment of its contents, and its
visibility and impact in the research community. Serious
personnel reviews should not be based merely on counting, but
also on substantive assessments. Given the state of pure e-
publishing today, we suspect that it would be hard for any
scholar in Information Systems to establish a record of
significant high-visibility research based primarily upon
publications in pure e-journals. (But that's an empirical issue
and may change in the next decades.)
We are interested in establishing dialogs with researchers who
are interested in the nature of publishing in multiple media and
scholarly communication practices. We will be happy to share
preliminary results with others.
Rob Kling & Geoff McKim
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/~kling/
http://www.kiva.net/~mckimg/personal/
Center for Social Informatics
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/
-------------------------
Work in progress -- Research on use of electronic media
What is Publishing?
==============================================
==========
Abstract of a Paper in Process:
"Scholarly Communication via Publication in Multiple Media:
Elements of a Policy Analysis", by Rob Kling and Geoffrey
McKim
This is a period of seeming instability of scholarly publishing
practices -- especially electronic publishing The cacophonous
discourse can be thematized around a series of issues that "are in
the talk" as much as "in the published literature -- "legitimacy of
e-publishing and e-journals; whether e-publishing will reduce
overall costs, expand access to documentary materials & in that
sense democratize; whether scholars should vigorously embrace
e-publishing; how e-publishing will effect traditional paper
publishers; and how e-publishing will effect libraries.
Disciplinarity socializes more junior scholars into beliefs about
appropriate forms of scholarly communication -- such as the
relative value of working papers, conference papers, journals,
and anthologies. Editorial elites in the disciplines articulate
conventions for participating scholars. Today, there is
significant diversity across some physics fields in which
working papers are a legitimate communication format,
computer science (which supports e-publications that precede
paper publication), and both American psychology and
chemistry where the APA and ACS have tried to ban scholarly
e-publishing. (Scholars who work at the intersection of
disciplines with differing publication practices are in a special
bind).
Unfortunately, much of the literature about scholarly
e-publishing does not analyze the bases for communication
practices in different fields; and in fact, often homogenizes the
character of publishing. This talk provides an analytical
approach for evaluating disciplinary conventions and for
proposing policies about e-publishing. We characterize three
dimensions of scholarly publishing, and discuss how various
kinds of paper and electronic publications appear in this
framework. One byproduct of this analysis is that the common
claims of e-publishing "expanding access" are seen as
problematic. In fact, most of today's e-publishing reduces
sustained access to scholarly reports and articles, in contrast
with traditional paper media, except when long-term access is
facilitated by the stewardship of institutions such as libraries and
clearinghouses.
----
Rob Kling http://php.ucs.indiana.edu/~kling
The Information Society (journal) http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS
Center for Social Informatics http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI
Indiana University
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