electronic journals

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An interesting debate alright, but one governed by lots of different
opinions and feelings about what a journal is, should be, etc.  This has
resulted in misconceptions and misinformation, as well as many good
comments.  Additionally, there are already many other electronic journals
that have been operating since at least last year.   Anyway, let me give
you mine.

Since I edit Marine Micropaleontology, which will go online shortly, I can
provide some information.

If you want an online forum for immediate publication of your unrefereed,
non-standardized work, you've already got it in PaleoNet or any of many web
sites.

If you want a real scientific journal with the usual standards, then there
are other considerations.  The usual standards include at least the
following:

Readable in whatever language it is posted in. (i.e. grammatically correct
and spelled right).
Standardized format, so that readers know what to expect and where to look.
Quality illustrations.
Peer review to ensure the science is correct and the writing understandable
according to the standards of the subdiscipline.

These tasks are the same for a print journal.  Publication time for a
Marine Micropaleontology paper is about 5 months from acceptance to print.
That time period includes copy editing, illustration checking, plate
design, as well as page layout and type setting from electronic disk or
typescript.  Printing and mailing take little time and is included in there
as well.  This journal is different in that it is issued when a number is
full, and it will publish any amount of text, figures or plates that is
justified by the science.

What can take the most time in the whole process is peer review and
author's revision.  The fastest peer review I've ever done was less than
one week when I had electronic text and emailable reviewers.  The longest
can be over a year.  The chief problem here is not the time it takes to
read the ms, but trying to get the reviewer to read it at all.  Most papers
can be read critically in a day or so, so why should it take a year, or a
month or even a week to review a ms.  Because we are all busy doing other
things and its not always fun to review mss.  They go in the paper
stratigraphy on our desks and may emerge at a much later time.   The
Electronic Journal of Geology pays its reviewers and that should make them
feel guilty, if not hurry them up.  Author revisions are commonly even
longer, I presume for much the same reason.  When you solve these problems,
you will have faster publication, whether in print or cyberspace.

For Society or other regularly published journals, the 5 months may be
longer because they publish on a schedule.  If you want a quality
electronic journal, then these same tasks for the most part need to be
performed.  An electronic journal could speed publication time chiefly by
issuing each paper as soon as it was accepted and prepared for posting.
Simply number the pages consecutively and declare a volume at some known
point.  I'd keep page and volume numbers so that your vita will look the
same for both print and e.j.s.  This speed is worth it, too, in my opinion,
to go electronic.

Costs:  If you want a quality e.j., then you need an independent editor,
copy editing person or staff, and, additionally, someone who can put it on
the WWW (could be one of the others, but it is yet another task).  You need
sympathetic reviewers, too, who might not get paid.

The only free part (maybe) of this system is the author's efforts in
writing and illustrating the paper, and the reviewers.  Someone or some
group will pay for the other services, as happens for every journal in
existence.   Society journals are heavily subsidized by employers of the
editors or copy editors.  In fact, for years some societies I know of tried
to get USGS people to edit journals or other stuff because the feds covered
salary, postage, secretarial, etc., whereas the most obvious other choice,
college or university editors, often had to fight to be allowed to do it
and the help was cheap student labor (but still paid for by the society).
The e.j.s I've looked at are trying different modes of capturing costs.
Some will charge by the download, some by a set subscription price, some by
selling the completed e.j. on CD-ROMs to libraries (which is a hell of a
good idea for archiving sake), some, like Elsevier may charge a
subscription price only to workers where a hard copy is purchased by the
library.  You could also charge the authors.

Acceptance in employee reviews:  I never worried about whether or not
electronic journals would count with Deans or supervisors when it comes to
publication evaluation for promotion.  These guys know very little about
any journal.  For example, my Dean, a physiologist, and my Chair, a
crustacean behaviorist, probably have never heard of the Jour of
Paleontology or Paleobiology.  They accept my opinion that these are good
journals in my field, I show them letters from the editors re: acceptances,
and I indicate they are peer reviewed.  Of course I include reprints that
look fancy.  If an e.j. held the same standards as these print journals and
we could demonstrate that it did, and that it was read by most of the
subdiscipline and hence had influence, I could easily convince anyone at
Berkeley that this kind of publication was legitimate.  If they wouldn't
buy it, I would simply suggest to them that they were in the scientific
stone age of old time paper publishing and that this institution could not
be there.  If that did not get them, I'd take it to the Academic Senate
where I am sure I would win.  But I suspect I'd never have any problems
whatsoever as long as the e.j. met the usual scientific standards.  One way
to bolster the reputation of any e.j. is to have it sponsored by a
scientific society or organization, rather than individuals.  Deans, etc.,
respect the power of the membership as a guarantor of quality--usually.

I suspect that we're going to do it and that the best electronic journals
will  be those with a regularly paid or subsidized editor who seeks outside
reviews and takes much care in what is posted and how.  Societies and
commercial publishers are going to do this, most likely, if for no other
reason that the credence that comes with it.  They already are, and
paleontology only needs to select a way to go about it.

I'd suggest that the Paleontological Society join with Palaeo. Ass. and
maybe some others to sponsor an e.j., with archived CD-ROMS.  We could
start tomorrow by simply adopting the methods of any of 100's of
now-existing e.j.s in other fields.





Jere H. Lipps,  Director
Museum of Paleontology
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720 USA

Voice:  510-642-9006.  Fax:  510-642-1822
Internet:  jlipps@ucmp1.berkeley.edu
WWW:  http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu