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The ACM Electronic Publishing Plan part 1 of 2
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 11:53:16 -0500
From: booloo () framsparc ocf llnl gov (Mark Boolootian) To: farber () central cis upenn edu Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 08:50:09 -0800 (PST) Dave, Below is a copy of ACM's plans for electronic publishing. I think it is a definitive piece of writing and lays out the issues of publishing in the face of changing technology quite well. Important reading for all concerned. (One side note - the document was formatted for viewing with a Web browser. I've cleaned up things to the point of keeping lines at 80 columns or less.) ------ November 30, 1994 I am pleased to enclose a copy of the ACM's electronic publishing plan, which contains our vision about the future of scientific publishing and our program to achieve it. Our interim answers to the policy questions raised in this plan are recorded in two separate documents, the ACM Copyright Policy and ACM Author's Guide to the Copyright Policy, which are also being distributed to you. These documents are available on <acm.org>. I hope you will read this plan carefully. With all the changes in digital media and publication, there is much going on that deserves your reflection. If you have comments, please send them to Mark Mandelbaum, Director of Publications, at ACM (Mandelbaum () acm org). Cordially, Peter J. Denning Chair, ACM Publications Board =============================================== Copyright 1994 (c) by ACM, Inc. Permission to copy and distribute this document is hereby granted provided that this notice is retained on all copies and that copies are not altered. =============================================== THE ACM ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING PLAN Peter J. Denning Chair, Publications Board Bernard Rous Deputy Director, ACM Publications 11/30/94 Introduction Publishing has reached an historic divide. Ubiquitous networks, storage servers, printers, and document and graphics software are transforming the world from one in which only a few publishing houses print and disseminate works, to one in which any individual can print or offer for dissemination any work at low cost and in short order. This poses major challenges for publishers of scientific works and for the standard practices of scientific peer review. The ACM aims to be one of the first scientific society publishers to cross the divide. ACM has embarked on an ambitious electronic publication plan. The plan and the reasons for adopting it are set forth below. The Association for Computing Machinery is the first scientific and educational society formed in the computing field (founded 1947). From the very beginning it entered scientific publishing by establishing the monthly Communications of ACM and a peer review process for accepting papers into it. Over the years, its library of traditional journal-type publications has grown to the present size of 17 periodicals including the one monthly, several bimonthly, and the rest quarterly. Its 78,000 members hold 55,000 subscriptions to its journals and nonmembers hold another 12,000 subscriptions. In the 1960s, ACM established a series of special interest groups (SIGs) that started issuing informal newsletters of their own and began to hold conferences and symposia that published proceedings. Over time, this grew into a large enterprise, featuring 90,000 memberships in 39 SIGs that sponsor 45 conferences per year and print 17,000 pages of proceedings. All told, ACM literature is growing at the rate of approximately 1 gigabyte per year. The publications of the traditional journals and SIGs constitute a large enterprise, on the order of a third of ACM's $30-million budget. The Scientific Publishing Tradition The scientific publishing tradition is a collection of practices and assumptions that have become part of the values and common sense of science. A central tenet of this tradition is publication only after careful and deliberative review by experts. Not only is it considered wasteful to publish a paper that contains errors or repeats earlier work, it is an affront to the tradition of science to publish statements easily refuted by experts. Another tenet is that every published paper is a permanent member of the library of all scientific literature. Many of the scientific societies established their own publishing houses and established review processes; through their membership, they have access to the expert reviewers and they have a ready-made audience of readers. The societies ensure that repositories exist containing back issues of their publications. In this tradition, a journal paper passes through four phases, separated by three key moments of public declaration: A. Preparation -- author drafts preliminary version with early results and obtains informal review by close colleagues. This phase ends with the submission of manuscript to an editor with a request to review and publish it. B. Review and revision -- editor commissions reviews from several experts, called "referees", and, based on their advice, either rejects or requests revisions from the author. This phase ends with the editor accepting the paper. C. Publication processing -- editor sends manuscript to publication office for copyediting, layout, queueing, and printing. This phase ends with the actual publication of the paper in a journal and its dissemination to subscribers. D. Archiving and indexing -- societies and libraries preserve back issues; libraries catalog papers; abstracting services summarize recent papers; citation services accumulate citation indices. Students and other readers use these services to locate works long after they were published. The second and third phases typically take 6-18 months each, or a total time from submission to publication of 12-36 months. The fourth phase is ongoing. The phases are separated by three key public declarations: 1. Submission -- author declares the paper submitted to an editor; this is documented by a letter to the editor. 2. Acceptance -- editor declares the paper accepted; this is documented by a letter to the author. 3. Publication -- publishing house prints and distributes the copies of the journal issue in which the paper appears. A copyright transfer usually takes place as part of acceptance. The author grants the publisher the right to use the work in any form for any educational or scientific purpose of the publisher's parent scientific society and retains rights for patents and reuse of the work. The system relies heavily on the will of the society to continue the journals by marketing and managing subscriptions, setting standards, and appointing new editors. This system also relies heavily on the volunteer efforts of experts and editors. Most of the editorships are volunteer positions; most societies form search committees to locate new editors-in-chief and delegate to the editor-in-chief the authority to appoint associate editors. The reviewers are almost always volunteers; it is the common sense of the field that an author who submits a paper "owes the field" three reviews. In practice, many reviewers report that they receive an average of one manuscript a month for review and that it takes them 2 to 6 months to complete a given review. Most publishers follow three additional policies. One is a "novel submission" policy, under which an author is expected to submit substantially new material that does not overlap significantly with previous submissions by that or any other author. Second is a "no scooping" policy, under which an author has no authority to distribute copies publicly until the paper has actually been printed. Third is a "proper citations" policy, under which an author is expected to give proper credit to all other persons who contributed to the work in some way, either through previous publication or through private communications. Authors who violate these policies typically receive reprimands from editors and may jeopardize their future right to publish with those journals. These policies and practices collectively serve to provide an "imprint" or imprimatur to the novelty and soundness of published scientific works. The society gains prestige in the science community by seeking to publish only the most novel, significant, readable, and well-grounded works. The authors gain prestige in the science community by having their works published in prestigious journals. The imprints of a society can be of significant professional value to an author -- for example, academic authors consider them essential to promotion and tenure. The harder it is to achieve the imprint and the higher the quality it signifies, the greater its value to an author. Although less visible, the policies and practices of archiving and indexing are as critical as publishing. A society's imprint would be worthless without reasonable assurances that the published work will be preserved for posterity and that readers can locate the work without having to locate the author. Authors who argue that the publishing process ends with publication are forgetting the importance of archiving to the preservation of their work. Breakdowns in the Traditional System The traditional scientific publishing system is now facing a variety of breakdowns that must be overcome if the system is to survive. We assume that resolving these breakdowns is preferable to abandoning scientific publishing.
From ACM's perspective, the breakdowns are:
1. Most of our journals are written by experts for other experts, but these experts constitute less than 20% of the readership. The other 80%, who are typically experts from other subdisciplines or are practitioners, may be interested in the results but do not have the time or background to understand the specialized language of the journal's domain experts. These 80% are showing their growing dissatisfaction with the enterprise by complaining about too many esoteric papers, dropping their subscriptions and sometimes their memberships, and demanding new kinds of publications that they find more approachable. With the increasing penetration of computers into everyday practices of society, this group is growing. In ACM we refer to the traditional line of publications, which are the majority of our journals, as "Track 1". We are gradually introducing a new line of publications aimed at the other readers; we call these the "Track 2" publications. Among other things, the Track 2 publications can bridge between practitioners and research scholars. 2. Authors are increasingly dissatisfied with delays in the process. It often takes 6-18 months to complete the review-revise phase, and another 12-18 months after that until actual publication. Even if we could magically remove the publication delay by clever use of advanced technology, authors would still be dissatisfied with the long review time. Moreover, readers are dissatisfied if they believe that a result known 1-3 years ago has taken this long to be published. 3. It is an increasingly popular practice among authors to post their manuscripts on publicly-accessible FTP servers at or before the moment of submission, thus making the moment of publication precede the moment of acceptance. This practice, sometimes called "circulating preprints", not only accelerates the dissemination of new results, it is seen by many as improving the quality of works by subjecting them to wider scrutiny than that of a few referees. This obviously poses a challenge to the policy of not considering previously published works. 4. New questions are arising about who owns (or should own) the copyrights. Since the FTP server is becoming the author's means of dissemination (at least to a core group of interested persons), some authors now wonder whether there is any value in signing over the right to disseminate to a publisher -- and some openly wonder if there is any need for the publisher at all. Other authors are looking to publishers to be their agents in bringing their work to the widest audience, and protecting and preserving their work. Artists, following their standard practice, often retain copyright to their art images, and only give permission to include those images in specific papers; this challenges the policy that the publisher may freely distribute copies of the entire paper and complicates electronic redistribution. 5. Libraries are suffering under reductions of their budgets at a time when subscription prices have been rising faster than inflation and the number of scientific journals has been growing rapidly. They are dropping journal subscriptions and joining together in consortia that share one subscription among several institutions. They do not save all published journals; they look instead to the professional societies to do that. This threatens the archiving function by removing the commitment to retain all works indefinitely. It is highly likely that many scientific works exist as citations only (the original documents have been lost), and that many others have been lost completely. 6. The relentless rise of the number of printed journal papers and their prices, and in the number of manuscripts distributed by electronic means, is causing "information overload". Individuals and institutions alike are shifting from a mode of acquiring publications for "just-in-case" use to a mode of acquiring them "just-in-time". The latter mode is increasingly facilitated by on-line reference databases and document delivery services. This trend, which appears irreversible, will eventually lead to the disintegration of print journals as pre-selected collections of worthy papers. 7. Although publishers say that it is not in their mission to cater to academic concerns for recognition, tenure, and promotion, these concerns nonetheless have been a powerful engine in the scientific publishing industry. Authors tend to submit to journals with the highest perceived prestige. Tenure committees are beginning to assess the value of the imprint rather than the print journal itself. Submissions to traditional journals continue to INCREASE even as readership decreases, leading to what some are starting to call "write-only journals". 8. Authors are increasingly viewing their works as "living in the web", an allusion to the rapidly growing World Wide Web of interconnected documents. They see networks as new opportunities for collaborative authoring and for "dynamic documents" that incorporate other documents by link rather than by direct copying. Over time, authors want to introduce either new versions or changes into their own works. This is raising new problems of version control, copy-on-demand when exercising a link, reference, citation, and copyright of a non-fixed work. 9. Authors of works stored in the "web" increasingly use active hypertext links to other works rather than the traditional citation. "Clicking" on the link invokes a process that copies the referenced work from a remote site. Such a link, when used, becomes a way of incorporating another work on demand into a document. Link-use is not contemplated in existing copyright policy. 10. Some authors are posting complete collections of their personal works on servers where others can locate them easily simply by knowing the author's name. In effect, the three key moments of the traditional process -- submission, acceptance, and publication -- are no longer distinct or in traditional order. The moment of publication is, with the help of public servers, increasingly likely to precede the moment of submission. The moment of acceptance is becoming the moment of imprimatur. Printed publication is becoming less important to authors. The responsibility for archiving and indexing is gradually being abandoned by librarians, who cannot afford comprehensive collections or the software tools for electronic archives. ACM's Response as a Society Publisher These breakdowns, and the other changes in means of publication and distribution, show that the scientific publishing enterprise is being transformed. The broad outlines of what will emerge are already discernible in the practices of some publishers and in the visions many are expressing of the future. These outlines are centered around a structured database containing the society's published works. o Journals will become "streams" flowing into the society's database and will retain their identities as "database categories"; at the moment of acceptance, a paper will be placed in the database rather than into a print queue at the publication house. Separate issues and page limits will disappear. o Societies will offer facilities and mechanisms whereby authors can post collections of their works and obtain public comment on early versions of them. o Individuals will cease to purchase journal subscriptions and will instead purchase a right of access to the entire database. They will post interest-profiles and will be automatically notified when new items matching their profiles are posted. They will read from the database and will be responsible for their own printing. The publisher may provide print copies on demand or by fax for a fee. o Publishers will distribute "notices of availability" rather than journals or documents; readers will locate and obtain copies on demand using new software tools. Local agents specializing in print-on-demand will be established in print shops, copy shops, and libraries, especially at universities. o New kinds of services such as search, extract, and repackaging will be made available. o New kinds of works including hypertext, picture, graphics,
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- The ACM Electronic Publishing Plan part 1 of 2 David Farber (Feb 09)