Stage 1: Digital Communication
Embrace of digital communication Other Information:
Full Embrace of Digital Communication -- The first change is to replace paper with the Internet as the primary mechanism of
scientific communication. The existing "standard practice" of the research process remains intact except that communication
occurs digitally and, once accepted, articles move to publication very rapidly. In one sense, the transformation to digital
has occurred already. Virtually all scientific journals make their articles available digitally. Most scientists use the Internet
as their primary means of acquiring and sharing articles. In another sense, key scientific publishing practices are still
based on the constraints of publishing on paper.
Stakeholder(s):
- Scientific Journals
- Scientists
- Publishers: Publishers accumulate accepted articles, bundle them into issues, print them on paper, and ship them at regular intervals
to institutional and individual subscribers. This practice emerged in the 1665 with publication of the first two scientific
journals, one of which is still publishing—the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This practice, initiated
almost 400 years ago, is still the guide for how scientific knowledge is communicated today.
- Royal Society
- Printers: Making the Internet the primary vehicle for scientific communication removes printing and shipping and embraces electronic
delivery. It makes unnecessary the concept of an "issue"—articles bundled together and sent to subscribers at systematic intervals.
Issues are dysfunctional for digital communication because they introduce an irrelevant publication lag between acceptance
and availability. This lag varies from months to years, with the typical range probably being between 5 and 10 months, which
is between 20 and 40% of the total time between submission and publication in the case study. When articles are made available
digitally, publication lag can be eliminated completely. Articles can be published upon completing the editorial review and
copyediting process. Notably, the two case study articles with the shortest time to publication both appeared in digital journals
that have no publication lag.
- Journal Publishers: It is encouraging that many journal publishers (e.g., Elsevier, Sage) now make "in press" articles available online in advance
of publication. Even in these cases, however, issues are still eventually printed. As a consequence, another constraint of
paper is retained unnecessarily—page limits. Page limits are an underappreciated constraint on scientific communication. The
number of articles that can be accepted at a journal is limited by the number of pages that the publisher is willing to print.
Printing costs money. Publishers rationally keep constraints on the number of articles published to maintain a profit margin.
If the editorial team accepts more than the publisher will print, then the publication lag gets longer.
- Elsevier
- Sage
- Editorial Teams: If the editorial team wants to prevent an unwieldy publication lag, then it must accept fewer articles. Whether the journal
receives 100, 1,000, or 10,000 submissions, the number of articles published will be roughly the same. A common editorial
decision letter compliments the authors as having done good science but regrettably notes that the journal gets so many submissions
that many good ones are rejected.
- Editors: Editors easily accept submissions that get universal praise and reject submissions that get universal disapproval, but most
submissions are somewhere in between. Interrater consistency among reviewers is low (Bornmann et al., 2010; Marsh & Ball,
1989; Peters & Ceci, 1982; Petty et al., 1999). With just a few reviewers for each submission, this produces a substantial
chance element in the publication process (about half of the variability is due to chance, according to one estimate; Whitehurst,
1984). Despite recognition of the chance factors, because of page limits, the editor's default action must be to reject. As
a consequence, the same paper can be reviewed by many different journals that are all essentially equivalent on prestige,
impact, and quality until the chance factors align sufficiently to earn acceptance. This wastes researchers, reviewers, and
editors' time.
- Researchers
- Reviewers
- Journals: In the case study, 20 articles were initially rejected and eventually accepted to journals with known IFs. Eight of those
(40%) were published in a journal that had a similar IF (within 1.0) of the originally submitted journal. The article may
have improved with revisions across journal submissions (we hope so), but—assuming that the process is rational—such improvement
could have been accomplished more efficiently with the original journal, editor, and reviewers. With no page limits, journals
can set their publication standards however they wish, and accept as many or as few articles that meet those standards. The
size of the journal would be determined by the journal criteria and the quantity and quality of submitted manuscripts. Editors
would have more leeway to address the unreliability of the review process and have more flexibility to work with manuscripts
at the margin rather than defaulting to rejection. This could reduce (not eliminate) the frequency with which the same "good"
paper requires multiple rounds of author, editor, and reviewer time. Table 2 from the case study illustrated the weak relations
among number of journal submissions and time to publication with eventual citation impact.
- Shippers: There are other benefits of digital communication. Printing, shipping, and storage costs are near zero. "Delivery" occurs
in multiple ways—a website for continuous access, automated feeds for instant dissemination of new papers relevant to one's
topical interests, and weekly e-mails to subscribers with highlights of recent articles. Some journals already provide these
services. Also, web-based publishing enables improved search and linking capabilities such as adding hyperlinks to citations
for immediate article retrieval. Finally, with paper, a researcher must subscribe individually or have physical access to
a subscribing library. With digital communication, access can be just a matter of having an Internet connection. The Research
Information Network (2008) estimated that converting 90% of publications to electronic-only would save 5% of the costs to
publishers and 36% of libraries' costs to access them (more than $1.6 billion total; see also Houghton, 2009).
- Storage Vendors
Objective(s):
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