STEVAN HARNAD'S "SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL": [l. 63]

Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship

A Summary and Analysis

Many readers interested in electronic publishing will know of Stevan Harnad, pioneering publisher of _Psycoloquy_, one of the first peer-reviewed, all-electronic journals. In numerous talks and articles (Harnad 1990; Harnad 1991; Harnad 1992; Harnad 1995a) he has argued that electronic publishing is the logical way to cope with the spiraling costs and glacial speed of print publication. In order to save the entire scholarly industry from collapsing under the burden of its own ballooning costs, he urges the scholarly community to abandon its current "papyrocentric" attitudes and "take to the skies."

Recently, Harnad precipitated a long, lively, provocative, and only occasionally acrimonious electronic discussion among some of the key players in the electronic publishing field. (The discussion is archived for electronic retrieval at:

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/

and is being published as a hardcopy collection edited by Ann Okerson and James O'Donnell (see references). He provoked this discussion by circulating what he called a "subversive proposal" to force the publishing industry to better serve the scholarly community. Like most such discussions, this one follows many different threads, recycles back into itself, and sometimes almost disappears in the tangle of embedded messages and replies typical of electronic polylog. But in the course of this convoluted exchange the participants explore exhaustively many of the most important issues concerning the future of scholarly publishing.

In the present essay I do not presume to offer a wholly new contribution to the debate. Rather, I will first summarize Harnad's radical vision for the future of electronic publishing, and then present some of the main pro and con arguments from the ensuing discussion of this radical vision. I will also summarize some of the more interesting side arguments regarding the economics of the Internet in general. Finally, I will end with some personal analysis of the debate and some observations about electronic publishing.

2. The Subversive Proposal [l. 108]

As I mentioned above, Harnad and others have long maintained that much or all of the future of scholarly publishing lies in transferring scholarly research to the internet: what he calls "scholarly skywriting." Internet publication not only eliminates much of the cost of publishing, but also allows for an extremely quick turnaround of articles and responses to them. This quick turnaround is, of course, especially important in the sciences, where ideas become stale within weeks or even days. But Harnad argues for more than timely presentation of ideas. He argues that in the electronic world, presentation of ideas as lapidary product of thought can be replaced by in-process texts that participate in the development of thought. The process is more akin to oral dialogue than to electronic representations of finished texts.

Absolutely fundamental to Harnad's argument is the distinction between what he calls the "trade model" of publishing and "esoteric" publishing. "Esoteric" has come to mean "obscure" or "difficult for the lay audience to understand," a popular meaning that perhaps makes Harnad's choice of terms somewhat unfortunate. However, Harnad is fond of presenting the full dictionary definition of the term as follows:

esoteric 213 aj .es--'ter-ik
LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN]
1 a aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
1 b aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
2 a aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL]
esoterically 21313 av -i-k(-)l{e-}
(Harnad 1995)

According to this definition, esoteric publishing is obscure to the lay audience only as a side-effect of the fact that it is aimed at a very small circle of readers. This circle can range from several thousand in "mainstream" disciplines to a handful in the more specialized sub-subdisciplines of science. Opposed to this form of publishing is "trade" publishing, which because it is designed to make money has to appeal to a reasonably large audience.

This has other important implications. Trade publication must obviously be protected by copyright; if anyone could copy trade works, publishers could not make money. In other words, trade publication requires as an essential condition of its being that access be restricted. This "pay-to-see" model applies even to highly subsidized academic journals, which must nonetheless receive some subscription revenue in order to stay afloat. The costs of paper publication require a predictable revenue flow.

A need for predictable revenue offers little problem for, say, established novelists, who want to make money from the sale of their books. However, such a model-- where access is by necessity restricted --is exactly antithetical to scholarly work. Scholars are paid by their institutions and by granting agencies in direct proportion to their scholarly output and reputation. This in turn is closely linked to readership. The more people who read, respond to, and build on a scholar's work, the better off she is, not only in terms of the intangible satisfaction of having made a difference, but also financially. The "consumers" of scholarly publishing, in the sense of the people who actually derive benefit from it, are not the readers but the writers. [l. 171]

Scholars have consented to having their works published and sold in trade format simply because there was no other way to get their ideas in circulation. Harnad repeatedly calls this arrangement a "Faustian bargain." This bargain is not necessarily motivated by the greed of individual publishers, an allegation that many have read into Harnad's comments but which I am convinced is a misinterpretation. It is simply a structural constraint of the medium. Yet the term "Faustian" certainly suggests that the union between scholarly production and a capitalist economy is a necessity, not a virtue. As Harnad puts it,

Both the trade author and the esoteric author had to be prepared to make a Faustian bargain with the paper publisher (who was not, by the way, the devil either, but likewise a victim of the bargain; the only devil would have been the Blind Watchmaker who designed our planet and its means of publication until the advent of the electronic publication era). (Harnad, 1995b)

Since the demise of monastic scriptoria this relationship has been the only game in town.

Electronic publication obviously provides an alternative to this bargain. Yet electronic publication has been slow in coming and slower in meeting acceptance. Many on-line journals are nothing more than mirrors of paper journals, which continue to be the main conduits for academic knowledge and associated academic rewards.

Trade publishers are obviously in no hurry to move to electronic publishing because it is difficult to see how to make any money at it. Harnad's "subversive proposal" suggests that scholars not wait for the publishing industry to ooze slowly onto the net. Taking his cue from Paul Ginsparg's incredibly successful electronic archive

http://xxx.lanl.gov/

which reportedly receives 45,000 hits per day (Harnad 1995a; see also Stix 1994), Harnad recommends that we leave the publishing industry behind and take to the skies ourselves:

If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric writing he did from this day forward, the long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow suit almost immediately. (Harnad 1995a) [l. 218]

This archive would begin with preprints, as Ginsparg's does. However, as soon as a work was published in "standard" format, authors would replace the preprint version with the published version. The trade publication model would immediately become untenable for esoteric publication. Publishers would be forced to figure out a way to co-operate with scholarly skywriting or abandon it altogether, making their profits only by publishing non-scholarly works for which there is high demand. Thus scholarly preprints would "break down the doors" for fully refereed publication in electronic format (e-print.06). Scholars and scholarly electronic journals, meanwhile, would be totally supported as they are partially supported now, by subsidy rather than by market revenues.

Others, including _EJournal_, have been championing electronic publication for years. What is particularly radical about Harnad's proposal is his recommendation of direct action on the part of the scholarly community, action that would end the hegemony of the publishing industry. In a sense, he has declared war on the industry that until now has been the major conduit for academics' only "product"-- scholarship.

3. The Debate about the Proposal

The long intertwining threads of debate spawned by this proposal can be grouped into several categories. Many of the discussions are technical in nature, having to do with technical standards, centralized versus distributed sites, etc. I will not attempt to summarize these issues here. However, I will try to provide a sketch of the controversy in four main areas: publishing costs, network costs, quality control, and stewardship.

3.1. Publishing Costs

An important plank in Harnad's platform is his assertion that scholarly writing on the net is cheap enough that it does not require a trade model for support. Harnad adamantly insists that electronic journals can be produced for 25% of the cost of paper journals. Some scholars, such as Lorrin Garson of the American Chemical Association, disagree. Garson argues that electronic publication will still cost at least 75% of the cost of paper publication because only a fraction of the cost of a paper journal actually goes into physical reproduction and distribution. The rest is "first-copy" cost, which includes the labour of editing, setting up tables, proofreading, etc. (Note to Stevan Harnad, vpieg-l, 29 June 1994).

[l. 265]

Harnad defends his figure by pointing out that many of the tools needed to set up charts and tables are currently available to authors and that authors need no longer pay publishers to do this work for them. Powerful public-domain search tools will make other services provided by publishers, such as indexing, equally obsolete. Quality control, the main remaining cost of publication, is usually handled by editors and reviewers who perform their task as part of their scholarly mandate, not for immediate financial reward.

Andrew Odlyzko (appropriately, a mathematician), supports Harnad's argument by calculating that, although the average article in Mathematics costs about $20,000 to author (the total cost of supporting a researcher divided by average output of articles), if produced electronically it would only cost about $4000 to publish (e-print.15; see also Odlyzko 1994). By re-engineering the publishing enterprise to eliminate many layers of now-unnecessary specialists, costs could be brought down far lower, to an estimated $400 - $1,000 per article. This cost, Odlyzko claims, would still be too high to make pay-per-view a viable option, but it could easily be covered by a subsidy model like Harnad's.

This model also dismisses the much-ballyhooed "copyright" issue as a red herring as far as scholarly publishing is concerned. Since scholars never expect to get paid directly for their work anyway, the ability to protect profit by restricting copying is simply not an issue (e-print.09). It only became an issue in scholarly publishing because publishers-- not scholars --had to protect their financial investment in the paper infrastructure.

Central to this argument is the distinction between mirroring of paper journals and true electronic publishing (like _EJournal_) which never sees print at all. Even all-electronic archives are frequently no more than warehouses for scanned versions of paper copy-- what Ginsparg deprecates as the "scan-and-shred" attitude to publishing. Only all-electronic journals have the potential to free themselves from the Faustian bargain with publishers.

3.2. Network Costs

One argument against the future of all-electronic journals is that they are cheap only because the have been getting a free ride on the Internet. As more services migrate to the net, and bandwidth becomes even more strained than it is now, it may be necessary for network providers to charge for carriage (Okerson, who-pays.16; see also "Culture Shock"). These charges have the potential to wipe out the cost savings of electronic scholarly journals.

Harnad points out that the Internet has also been giving a free ride to "porno-graphics, flaming and trivial pursuit," all of which might be looked to as ways of subsidizing the net before looking to scholarly publication (e-print.08). But again, the most interesting argument comes from a mathematician, Odlyzko.

[l. 318]

Since it is impossible to tell the difference between a packet of text and a packet of graphics, video or audio data, Internet pricing would have to be largely by-the-byte, perhaps with a surcharge for a guarantee of no delays to permit applications such as videoconferencing to proceed without interruption. By doing some "back of an envelope" calculations, he surmises that the average scholarly article in markup ASCII would cost something like 1/10,000 the cost of a one-hour videoconference (who-pays.19). Therefore the costs of maintaining and upgrading the physical structure of the net would be borne by high-end applications, not scholarly publishing (see also MacKie-Mason and Varian).

3.3. Quality Control

Probably the biggest problem that electronic scholarly journals face is quality control. Despite his optimistic claims for the future of electronic publishing, Harnad suggests that the Internet in its present state is little more than a "global graffiti board" in which unregulated conversation seldom attains the status of scholarship (who-pays.03). Other scholars such as Paul Ginsparg claim that this may be true of large areas of the net such as Usenet, but that other areas, such as his own electronic archive, have maintained high scholarly standards. Harnad, however, points out that such scholarly enclaves are in an extreme minority. Moreover, preprint archives such as Ginsparg's are "parasitic on the refereed paper literature for which most of its PREprints are ultimately destined" (who-pays.03). In other words, the preprints are generally of good quality because they are destined for a paper publication system which already has in place a mature and well-organized peer-review system.

This does not mean that a peer-review system cannot migrate to the net; in many case it has done so already. Harnad simply points out that electronic scholarship has a huge public relations job ahead of it if it is going to convince the scholarly world that it can do the job as well as paper publishing. A key component of this public-relations job will be a coding system that not only tells the reader whether an article is peer-reviewed, but also how rigorous the peer-review is, thus locating it in a prestige hierarchy similar to the one that has long reigned in print (who-pays.03).

An interesting sidebar to this argument is a proposal that the current system of up-front evaluation of articles could be replaced by a system that is in many ways more democratic. David Stodolsky argues (who-pays.11) that we could abandon peer review altogether if we let everyone publish anything and let citation rates be the true measure of academic success. Citation-counting, an almost impossible job in print, should be relatively easy to automate in cyberspace. Harnad dismisses this idea: "I do not believe for a minute, even in our absurdly populist age, that a popularity contest and box scores can or will replace the systematic scrutiny administered by editors and referees (imperfect as that is)." (who-pays.13). Nonetheless, Stodolsky raises some interesting possibilities occasioned by the powerful bibliometric apparatus available on the net.

3.4. Stewardship [l. 375]

If scholarship does indeed "take to the skies," who should be in charge of publishing and preserving it? Harnad's model takes its inspiration from unregulated personal sites such as Ginsparg's electronic archive, with the addition of peer review to the brew to make public archives less "parasitic on the paper-based review process." However, he leaves open the possibility that publishers could move to electronic publication in order to avoid being left behind, as long as they are prepared to go along with the "new order" of open access to knowledge.

Others are not so sure. Stodolsky, for instance, argues that commercial publishers are a lost cause because of their inherent conflict of interest, and suggests that there is more potential in commercial operators that benefit rather than lose by the move to on-line access. One suggestion is smart-card operators who are in the business of supplying secure access to data (e-print.12).

Regardless of who originates the data, the long-term question is who will ensure that it remains accessible for the future. This, argues Peter Graham, is the traditional job of the librarian, not the scholar, the publisher, or the commercial vendor (e-print.12). Bill Turner of Cornell Library neatly summarizes many of the most common worries in this area: that archives may not be secure, that the data may shift or be corrupted, that mistakes will be impossible to correct (e-print.17). Harnad retorts that most of these problems, especially the difficulty of correcting mistakes, are equally if not more characteristic of paper publication (e-print.17). Secure, encrypted, off-line archives will ensure the integrity of original versions for those who are truly worried about this issue.

The arguments regarding both the technology and the philosophy of long-term storage and accessibility are too complex to summarize here, and are in a sense peripheral to the "subversive proposal" itself. But archiving is an important piece of the puzzle. Libraries promise to have a much more active role in the dissemination of knowledge in the electronic universe than in the paper universe, particularly if traditional publishers ultimately drop out of the equation. (See Frank Quinn's article on this subject in _EJournal_ V4N2.)

4. Analysis and Commentary

Harnad's optimistic vision of virtually free knowledge on the Internet is certainly attractive. His differentiation between "trade" and "esoteric" publishing, obvious once stated his way, clarifies a distinction often blurred in discussions about "products" on the Internet, and his acknowledgement that copyright is simply irrelevant in esoteric publication removes a serious red herring. Perhaps most important, he has the courage to point out that, although publishers have performed an invaluable service to scholars for generations, their service lies in dealing with the intricacies of preparing and distributing paper. Much of this work may simply be irrelevant to electronic scholarship.

[l. 430]

Quality control must surely be the most central issue here. Considering the incredible pressure to publish, and the amount of junk scholarship that finds its way even into existing paper publications, and the incredible over-supply of publications that defies the most heroic efforts of scholars to keep up with their discipline, I am not terribly comfortable with Harnad's optimism that quality control mechanisms will automatically migrate to the net.

Harold Innis (1951) argues that media have a built-in bias toward certain types of social activity. The bias of paper is a function of its relative high cost, permanence and slowness (Innis calls it a "light" medium only in comparison to stone and clay). The cost of paper publication does not in itself ensure quality, but it represents a built-in incentive to establish quality control mechanisms. When a piece of research appears in print, the reader has the assurance of knowing that someone has spent a considerable amount of money to get it there and will therefore have taken some steps to ensure that it is worth the cost. Not so in electronic space.

In addition, paper publication provides tangible, object-centered quality indicators. Expensively produced, polished-looking journals naturally carry a prestige that cheaply produced journals do not, for the above reasons. The fact that journals are distinct entities in which individual articles are subsumed under a larger series, itself an artefact of print publication, also allows certain journals to acquire a reputation over time. Electronic publication, especially the individually archived preprint, has none of these quality-control signals. In other words, the "bias of the medium" means that the physical characteristics of print publication carry with them some important side benefits which may not migrate to electronic space as easily as Harnad assumes.

Anyone whose sins have compelled her to function as an editor will also know how poorly many scholars edit their own work. Material that would be returned unmarked if submitted as an undergraduate term paper somehow manages to get sent for publication. An editor who is earnest about getting material in print, and is not in charge of a journal of such high prestige that she can pick and choose freely from a significant oversupply of good manuscripts, must labour mightily to extract wheat from chaff. Because the boundary between chat forums and scholarly journals has no physical markers in cyberspace, the electronic editor must work even harder to convince both readers and writers that she is not running a "global graffiti board." This is not to say that such tasks are impossible, but it is to say that the bias of the medium may make them more difficult. If archived preprints do manage to "break down the doors" of electronic scholarship and break away from the Faustian bargain, the peer-reviewed electronic journals that follow will have to labour mightily to establish and keep their reputations without the hardcopy signals of quality that we have grown so attached to.

[l. 483]

Unfortunately, we can already see signs that the economics of print are migrating to the net in ways that blow very cold on the back the neck. One electronic journal, the _Electronic Journal of Communication_, began as a totally free journal supported by whatever academic brownie points its editors and contributors accumulated for their labours. However, the Comserve system that archives and distributes _EJC_ is now part of CIOS, the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship. In order to raise money for its activities, CIOS charges for membership, and denies full database retrieval privileges to non-members. These charges are undoubtedly justified; there is only so much that a free service can accomplish on goodwill and public purse. But the effect is that _EJC_ is now confined behind exactly the same sort of firewall that Harnad denounces as antithetical to esoteric scholarship. Its authors are in some ways less accessible than if they published only in print journals that their colleagues could read in libraries free of charge.

Another disturbing trend is the invention of "ecash," a secure electronic medium of exchange that obviates the need to transmit charge card information over the net (see the Ecash Home Page at

http://www.digicash.com/ecash ).

Such a mechanism makes perfect sense in the context of classic trade models such as mail-order commodities, commercial journals, and commercial films, music and the like. The problem is that in its present form, ecash doesn't represent "real" money at all. It is intended for use as part of a totally on-line economy. You use ecash to buy access to on-line information that has been placed in electronic "shopping malls." If you run out of ecash, the only way to get more is to post some information that you hope others will find useful enough to buy.

The system has not had, and probably will not have, any influence on electronic scholarship. In fact, commercial transactions on the Net are undoubtedly necessary in order to pay for the infrastructure and ensure that scholarship can still get a free, or cheap, ride. But it is nonetheless disturbing to see the development of a powerful incentive to sell what has traditionally been posted free. Since information is the main "product" of the Net, there is an incentive for this market economy to migrate from a trade in sex toys to a trade in knowledge. I don't disparage everything about capitalism, but I have to admit that it has been refreshing to work in a medium which has until recently been free of market forces by virtue of its technological structure.

Where is all of this heading? Of course we really have no idea, any more than Gutenberg did when he began his work. What is clear is that economics and technology have a very uneasy relationship. We have depended on an economically driven reward system for the distribution of our ideas ever since the printing press made the tribally subsidized bard obsolete. It is not at all clear whether the Internet, rapidly turning into the "Information Highway" complete with toll booths and fast-food restaurants, will be able to reverse this dependency. Harnad's image of the "Faustian bargain" for the soul of academic knowledge is more apt than I like to think.

[l. 541]

Probably the most important lesson of Harnad's work is that cyberspace is a medium inherently different from print, and that current "papyrocentric" models (one of Harnad's most felicitous terms) are likely to be very short on vision. One is reminded of the incunabula period of the book trade, during which books were printed to look as much like manuscripts as possible, and the Abbot of Sponheim urged monks to keep copying manuscripts by hand both to encourage diligence and devotion and to circumvent the "impermanence" of printed publication on paper (Eisenstein 1979: 14). We must remember that esoteric publication has had its crises of distribution and quality control before, and that some of the solutions to these crises-- including the Faustian bargain with the for-profit publication industry --were totally unimaginable by those at the centre of the shift. Media, knowledge and money have performed an intricate dance for many hundreds of years, and we can be certain that, whatever form the dance takes next, all three partners will be involved.

[ Thanks to Stevan Harnad, Paul Ginsparg and Andy Odlyzko for their correspondence and clarifications. ]

Note:

ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad
and at
http://www.princeton.edu/~Harnad.

This includes major articles, including those cited below, and most of the archived discussion on the "subversive proposal." The latter is contained in two sets of files whose filenames begin either "e-print" or "who-pays." These may be found at

ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal

See also the later exchange between Harnad and Steve Fuller, referenced below as Harnad, S. (1995b).

[ Another place to start looking for most of the texts related to this issue is in the regularly refreshed Hyperjournal Web area of Goldsmiths' College server:

http://www.gold.ac.uk/ Ed.]

REFERENCES:

Culture Shock on the Networks," _Science_ August 12, 1994: 879 - 81.

Eisenstein, E. (1979) _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change._ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. _Psychological Science_ 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting/

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. _Public-Access Computer Systems Review_ 2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in _PACS Annual Review_ Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) _Computer Conferencing: The Last Word_. Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: _Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists_ [A. Okerson, ed], 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992).

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg/

Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing. _Serials Review_, Special Issue on Economics Models for Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub/

Harnad, S. (1995a) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) _Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000_. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.peer.review/

Harnad, S. (1995b) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis. _Serials Review_ 21(1), pp. 70-72 1995.

http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis/

Abridged version in _Times Higher Education Supplement_ 12 May 1995.

Innis, H. (1951) _The Bias of Communication_. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

MacKie-Mason, J.K. and H. R. Varian, Some economics of the Internet, in _Networks, Infrastructure and the New Task for Regulation_, W. Sichel, ed., to appear. (Available via gopher or ftp together with other related papers from

gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu in /pub/Papers.)

Odlyzko, A, (1994) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals. _Intern. J. Human-Computer Studies_ (formerly _Intern. J. Man-Machine Studies_) 41 (1995), in press. Available via e-mail [the ftp file is compressed. Ed.

msg: send tragic.loss from att/math/odlyzko
to : netlib@research.att.com
or from
ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z (WWW)
netlib.att.com netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z (anonymous FTP)

Okerson, A. and J. O'Donnell. (1995) _Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing_. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries.

Quinn, F. (1994) A role for libraries in electronic publication. _EJournal_ V4N2, ll. 68 - 416.

Stix, G. (1994) The speed of write. _Scientific American_, 271(6),December. 106 - 111.