Electronic Publishing Steps Up the Pace

I read with great interest James Langer's article in the August 2000 issue of Physics Today (page 35) about changes in the electronic publishing business. I agree with most of Langer's analysis of the electronic publishing industry but feel his article has omitted an important point regarding its potential.

Most Internet use today is in the form of one-way communication; essentially a faster version of the printing press or a high-speed advertising vehicle. A fundamental strength of the Internet which has yet to be fully realized is the potential for interactive communication among several parties--that is, collaboration. Our campus houses the internationally known Collaborative Bibliography of Women in Philosophy, which runs on a single computer and is maintained by one student working part time. No one person created this bibliography. Hundreds of people from around the world have contributed, and continue to do so. As a result, the online, searchable bibliography is the most extensive and up-to-date one of its kind, created from the expertise of the entire community of philosophers.

Why do we do peer review? One distinguishing feature of doing science, as contrasted with literature, art, or philosophy, is a commitment to agreement, whether as collaboration among a research group, competitive collaboration between groups, or historical collaboration by improving on past efforts. Peer review is an attempt to reach widespread consensus, although this is easy to forget in the heat of the review process.

Can the new electronic media help us with peer review? As Langer points out, articles of low interest published on the Los Alamos e-print archive are ignored; he indicates this is a form of peer review. Why not formalize this process, making it possible for readers to submit comments, reviews, and reference links for an article they find interesting or relevant? Articles that generate lots of discussion, either positive or negative, would be perceived as important based on the number and quality of the comments. The extent of interest generated by an article might even be used in tenure and promotion decisions.

I have used the Web for peer review of student papers (students were allowed to rewrite papers for a higher grade after anonymous online feedback from others in the class). Such review is used currently in several English courses here.

Using a similar mechanism, authors could clarify, answer questions, and extend their work in response to criticism. An obvious role would exist for an editor/monitor, but less so than with most printed journals. I encourage the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics to break out of the printing-press mind-set and think of ways to use the new electronic media for more than one-way communication. Let's create a genuinely interactive--and democratic--electronic journal similar to the Los Alamos archive, where almost anything can be submitted, but where any peer can review or comment on it, as occurs, for instance, in really good list server discussions.

The future of electronic publishing is indeed bright, but two changes in current approach will be important.

First, the paper in our "paperless" offices multiplies every time we touch the computer. Reading a paper on the computer screen is uncomfortable, hard on the eyes, and does not allow marginal notes. And an article pulled from the Web is usually printed single sided instead of double sided. Because information on the Web sprawls over several pages when one page would do, wasting paper is too easy. Serious digital publication will require compact formatting and the near-universal use of two-sided printers.

Second, as anyone who uses e-mail can attest, electronic communication is too easy. Surely users can be strongly tempted to throw some half-digested results up on the Web with a few keystrokes. Perhaps this problem has solved itself among string theorists, but can we trust ourselves to objectively review our own work?

Langer replies: I agree with Kyle Forinash's remark that a fundamental strength of the Internet is its potential for interactive communication among several parties. In fact, taking advantage of this strength was what I had in mind when I predicted that the American Physical Society is headed toward some powerful combination of the unrefereed e-print archives (which already include lots of online interaction) and the refereed journals. But it's not yet clear to me how this merger will work. Our main objectives are, first, excellent research enhanced by new modes of communication and, second, a long-lasting archive of accessible, high-quality, scholarly publications. An unedited record of "a genuinely interactive--and democratic--electronic journal" may be useful to historians 20 years after publication, but it's not likely to be the best possible research tool for the scientists of that era.

Cynthia Cudaback raises an interesting question: Does electronic publication actually waste more paper than the conventional print journals? I don't know the answer. In my own case, I do tend to print lots of stuff. But I used to photocopy just as many papers from the print journals; and I generally copy or print only the material I really need, selected from an enormous database that remains in the environmentally benign form of electrons. I also notice that, when some of my colleagues receive old-fashioned preprints, they scan them into their computers and recycle the paper.

Cudaback's second point is also interesting but even harder to evaluate. Is the ease of electronic communication encouraging too many of us to throw caution to the wind by prematurely posting "half-digested" research results? If so, is that a bad thing?

I'm not convinced that electronic communication has greatly changed the way we play this particular game. We are eager to show our results to others because we want feedback and credit. At the same time, we don't like to risk the embarrassment of circulating wrong results, nor do we like to give away our best ideas before we have had a chance to develop them properly. The game is just played faster and more openly these days.