Frank Hartmann on Tue, 30 Dec 1997 02:43:14 +0100 (MET) |
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<nettime> Academic Paper Tigers |
Will academic publication rituals survive the media revolution? Will electronic publishing become a realistic option beyond printed books and journals? [From the December issue of FALTER, a Viennese weekly city journal] According to new technological possibilities, one has to ask why scientific publications all together are not online yet. If the publishers themselves are online, it is mostly for the sake of advertising their printed materials. 'Print' meaning their core business asset, of course. The products: journals and books are manufactured more or less expensively and this requires their selling as objects, to cover printing and distribution costs, pay the publishers themselves and sometimes the authors as well. Scientific authors seem to have a very different interest, though: to be read and to be quoted. This applies for academics, whose basic costs of knowledge production is covered more or less by public funds. Scientists should do everything possible to make their text accessible - and use electronic publishing for instance. But this is not the case, apart from some exeptions. Within the actual context of new media usage, the appropriate response to the new possibilities of knowledge transfer by the scientific community still is missing. Within a framework of guild organisation principles, the scientific community keeps to a restricted knowledge tansfer altogether, saving specific gatekeeping processes against the accessibility of an open information network. The internet is being used for restricted purposes, mostly email or some insignificant personal homepage. And yet, sociologists observe indicators for an industrialisation of the scientific discourse through new media, mostly according to the higher circulation speed of texts in general and the downgrading of the paper medium as well, especially in those disciplines where the discussion is focused on prepublished texts. The technology actually used for the production, circulation and consumption of scientific texts is rather primitive: the computer is being used, but mostly as an eleborate typewriter. Although practically nobody (exept for distinguished excentrics like Postman or Baudrillard, as they themselves claim) can afford to despise the "personal" computer as a performance enhancing device, the texts as a work result still exists on paper mainly, the exclusive medium which enables the circulation of thoughts in scientific discourse. The academic community relies on the paper medium for various reasons. A profane one - still is - the fear of contact with computer technology, which even is part of the identity for the so-called "humanities". Another one is the fact that career-enhancing publishing activity is really prestigious only if the seal of quality from reviewers, editors and publishers stays clearly visible. On the net, the practice of edited publishing is not the rule. This is the domain of established journals where texts get published according to a peer-review process, and where unsolicitited manuscripts from newcomers have practically no chance at all. Subscribing to scientific journals may be beyond the possibilities of an individuum, prices reaching up to 12.000 USD and more per year for 'Nuclear Physics' or 'Chemical Abstracts'. The publishers are losing their subscribers, which are not individuals any more but institutions and libraries. In the scientific discourse, most texts are published for libraries anyhow. Publishers slowly are losing interest in taking over the exploding production costs for a shrinking audience. Therefore, the well-established accomplice of scientists, publishers and libraries is crumbling down. The growing output of scientific publishing contributes to the fact that libraries may reach the limit of their storage capacities: the number of scientific journals multiplied by the factor of 1000 between the beginning of the 19th and the 20th century, with an estimated number of titles now around a million. A duplication of scientific publications takes place every 16 years. To get the idea, the holdings of the British Library grow a 20 kilometers each year. New ways of information retrieval and information selection react to this situation: databases and digital research tools take over the role of the established archive systems and libraries. The conservative lamento over the "information flood" gets within reach here. But there is also a chance to see this process as a differenciation of the fields of information and communication: since this is no effect of some unintentional technology, but the expression of different needs for an information society towards the end of the 20th century. While the available quantities of information double with high speed, the calculation potential of computers increases by the rate of ten. In other words, the innovation rate of computer industry provides much more storage capacities than all the information of our culture produces (depending on significant storage usage of course). The development of new software tools, like the popular HTML-editors, contributes to the embedding of new functions within text editing: professional publishing from ones own desktop to the worldwide Internet is not a big thing any more, the power of the demigods in the mainframe computing room is long broken. One should not have any illusions, however, about any direct or immediate results from these achievements. While most text editors are used for preparing the printing process, the publishers widely benefit from their authors taking over the (unrewarded) role of compositors, layouters, and proofreaders. So why do authors - or researchers and their institutions - have not yet decided to subvert the ruling publication system, simply by publishing 'preprints' to the net and abandon the 'print' format for good? Besides the fact that the technical media literacy also of persons who are supposed to be informed still is quite low, the common points usually raised here are 'quotation' and 'copyright'. As for quotation, this neat academic ritual is a generator of hypertext by itself. It would be wrong to believe though, that quotations indicating editions, volumes and pages should be tied to the paper medium. Electronically published texts are very well traceable if indexed on a meta-text level (e.g. META HTTP-EQUIV and META-NAME in the source code). Electronic quotations or hyperlinks may be even more helpful than printed quotes, for providing not only an indicator to some referred text but that text itself. Archiving the Internet is becoming more and more professionalised now (national libraries all over started archiving online publications already, equivalents of ISBN and ISSN are in the making), the easier will it be not only to follow the practice of 'quoting' a text but getting access to it. As for the next stereotype, there is copyright. Being a very young privilege in modern publication practice, to protect one's intellectual property is an interest which has to do with the condition of authors and their pubishers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The interest which should be protected here are rarely those of the intellectual author (maybe a fiction anyway, concerning the intertwinedness of texts and their contexts of production) than those of an elaborate commercial machinery. With the modification of the apparatus for production/distribution the existing laws tend to become anachronistic. This rocks the foundations of an education system which only in the turn to the nineteenth century started to replace the lectureship, i.e. the reading, lecturing, interpreting and commentating of given texts, with the concept of genuine authorship; a phase within which the academic community started to favour the paper medium and therefore journals and books were centralised as the primary source for intellectual socialisation and also as the medium for academic gratification. Printed matter is now losing its significance while being replaced or at least complemented by new media. We might not only witness a few publishers losing grounds in the near future, but also author-centered copyrights. Who believes that this is reason enough for profound cultural pessimism, should consider again whose economical interests are really at stake. The most plausible answer to our introductory question is that we live in a time of transition. Media-philosopher Vil=E9m Flusser deciphered this transition period as a crisis of the alphanumeric code itself, which is not suitable any more for the present information available and the scientific information in particular. Printed script is but one form to process stored information to put it in public discourse. An enhanced technology could replace publishing functions without a doubt. That of course does not mean the end to all the publishers. A recent CEC-study on 'electronic publishing' (DG XIII/E, Brussels 1996) defined the organising of communities as a main strategy for the publishing industry; electronic publishing obviously offers new possibilities for unifying content and services. Regional and local specifications are due, and it is exactly specific user groups which are again the target audience for the advertising industry. While data space supersedes paper as an organising principle, designing the new, digital context of awareness is defined a major corporate interest in electronic publishing. [for more background, see the interesting but dead 'paper tigers' discussion at http://www.esf.org/update.htm] --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de