Papyrophiles vs Cybernauts: The Future of Scholarly Publication

Papyrophiles vs Cybernauts: The Future of Scholarly Publication Gene V Glass Arizona State University glass@asu.edu (A paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association; October 13, 1994; Chicago, IL.)             My involvement with technology began early and inauspiciously.             In 1959, I was Bob Stake's computer programmer on a quantitative psych research project. I programmed a Burroughs 205 computer in machine language (the 205 console later served as the console for the Batcomputer on TV's Batman series). The machine had 4096 memory locations for storing data and operations; it used paper tape input and output; it took up an entire floor of Nebraska Hall. I now carry equivalent computing power on my wrist.             In 1962 I went away to graduate school at U Wis-Madison. In that era we all worshiped at the altar of the CDC 1604 mainframe. I learned three different programming languages before I finally threw up my hands and refused ever again to touch a computer. I made good on that promise for 25 years.             When I went to ASU in 1986, I was given an IBM AT PC as part of the "computer infusion" program of the University. I did not welcome it, but I didn't turn it down. I can honestly say that I hated computers at that point. It sat on the corner of my desk for two years before I ventured to turn it on. My first attempts were like yours--fumbling hours of frustration bringing forth little. It wasn't until a student showed me how to send a letter--an actual letter--from one computer to another across the phone line, that I took an interest in the machine. (Interest born of guilt at deserting my students for the summer when I escaped the desert heat for the Colorado Mountains. With email, I could be in touch without being there.) That was in the Spring of 1989. BY the Fall of 1989 I was using email to communicate outside of class hours with my students. In January 1990, I started a BITNET LISTSERV discussion forum on education policy; it will be five years old in a few months--it distributes to a few thousand readers some dozen or so postings a day.             In January 1993, I started a refereed scholarly journal that exists entirely on the INTERNET; as far as I am concerned, it never has to touch paper--whether end-users want to read it on paper is their business. I asked thirty people whose writing on the policy forum had impressed me to serve as an Editorial Board; none declined. I set up the LISTSERV parameters for EDPOLYAR, and christened the whole endeavor the Education Policy Analysis Archives. Within three weeks we had 800 subscribers (who pay nothing) and had published our first article. Later came gopher and the World Wide Web and thirty articles in less then two years.             EPAA has 1500 direct email "subscribers" and 40 gopher hits (at just one of its four locations) on an average day. One of its leading competitors in the education policy analysis publishing business just saw its subscriptions ($100 a year for about 300 pages) fall below 200. It's no mystery what is going on here; it is simple economics and in publishing, as elsewhere, it rules. Other things rule too--like culture and professional norms. They will play their role in shaping the future of research publication as well. (n.b.: at this time, April 1997, I have discontinued distributing the journal via email and gopher and now rely solely on the World Wide Web; the average daily number of persons accessing the journal on weekdays is about 600.)             In February 1991, Ann Okerson, Director of the Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing of the Association of Research Libraries, estimated that there were about thirty networked electronic journals. As of October 1994, I can find over two hundred scholarly electronic journals on the INTERNET, and give you simple directions for accessing all of them (gopher to gopher.cic.net to connect to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Network). In fact, Okerson herself in a press release dated May 23, 1994 reported that her organization had located 440 refereed electronic journals or scholarly newsletters. I know of a dozen ejournals in professional education, including EPAA, the Journal of Virtual Culture, Education, Research and Perspectives, Journal of Educational Theory, Interpersonal Computing & Technology, Journal of Counseling and Development, Journal of Distance Education & Communication, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Statistics Education, Journal of Technology Education, New Horizons in Adult Education, Rasch Measurement Transactions, Society for College & Univ. Planning News, TESLEJ: The Teaching of English as a Second Lang., The Chronicle of Higher Education, Distance Education Online Symposium News, EduCom Review, Education and Human Resources Reports (NSF), Educational Uses of Industrial Technology News (EDUCOM), and the Journal of Extension.             Perhaps you will concede that electronic publishing is different--different in its economics, different in its conveniences, but maybe even different in more fundamental ways. Let's explore some of the differences. The Comparative Advantage of the Ejournal             I have edited three journals on paper--going back to 1968 when I took over the Review of Educational Research for AERA and extending forward to 1985 when I finished editing the American Educational Research Journal for the very same AERA--and one ejournal. In my experience, the ejournal has been superior in every respect: cheaper to produce, faster, more accurate, better written. Typically I receive an article submitted to EPAA in the form of an email letter and mail it that day or the next to the entire editorial board, thirty individuals who donate their time to the journal just as referees always have. Those who submit reviews are self-selected on the basis of how busy they are and how appealing the topic of the article is. Within a week to ten days, I receive back from the board an average of about five to ten reviews. This compares with an average of two reviews in four to five months which was average for any paper journal I have edited or submitted to. I make a decision and send it and the reviews to the authors within a day or two of receiving the editorial board opinion. The article is in my office for less than two weeks. And some reason that is not at all clear to me, the reviews I have received from the EPAA board are long and more carefully done than what I received when editing paper journals--perhaps it is because since I can canvas the entire board on every submission, those who send reviews have special interest and expertise on the topic of the article being reviewed. The result is that authors are grateful for the reviews, which surpass any of those in their experiences in scholarly publishing, they work harder on revisions and they produce better final drafts. The first article that we published in EPAA was submitted, reviewed, revised and published in 14 days; and the author is at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.             The ejournal is not only faster and cheaper than its paper counterpart, but because of improved review by referees, it ought to be better too. Here's another respect in which ejournals are superior. The second issue of EPAA contained an article written by David Berliner, a colleague of mine: "Educational Reform in an Age of Disinformation," is the approximate title. This summer, a reader discovered that two of the tables in David's article contained some substantial errors in average SAT scores broken down by ethnic group. David had relied on an original source that was in error and the error did not become apparent until this reader tracked down the discrepancy in a new source. As soon as the correct figures were verified, we took the file of David's article off the gopher server and rewrote the tables and then archived the corrected version. Now anyone who accesses David's article (and it is transferred by someone about two times a day on average) gets the correct data. Contrast this with the correction of errata in paper journals; the error is corrected in some future issue on a back page and is not even indexed by the major abstracting and indexing services; a reader may, but more likely may not, see the correction, unless they search every page of every future issue of the journal (editors have a way of sticking these corrections into blank space wherever it might occur).             Odlyzko again, who edited a mathematics journal and experienced some of the advantages of telecommunications in connection with scholarly publication: "I am convinced that electronic publishing that is free to readers will take over in science and mathematics. It is impossible to predict accurately the date of transition. The basic technology that makes it possible is here, so it's a matter of guessing how soon the necessary infrastructure of editorial systems can be developed, and how quickly it will be accepted by the community. If nothing is done, I expect that traditional paper journals will become irrelevant to mathematicians' needs within 10 years. They might survive for a while longer, just because of the inertia of the entire academic publishing and library system, but then there might come a sudden transition, as the realization spreads that this system is obsolete."             Ejournals are easier to read, to quote in one's own writing, to share with colleagues and students. Most of these advantages are obvious and do not need explanation. But let me elaborate on one advantage that is not utterly obvious: readability. When I have an article in a word processor in my PC, I have far greater ability to move quickly around that article and find what is important to me than when it is on paper. Moving from the body of the text to the References is as fast as typing the first few letters of the authors name into the Search window of the word processor. And my own bibliographies grow quickly and with fewer errors when I cut and paste electronically the references I want from sources I trust.             The e-revolution will eradicate the costly "reprint" business. Commercial publishers charge profitable rates for reprints of published articles that are then mailed to authors who individually mail copies as they are requested. The entire process is slow, cumbersome and expensive. For years, impoverished academic libraries in eastern Europe were unable to subscribe to journals and authors sensed that the archaic reprint request system was the only means many scholars had of putting their hands on the literature. By contrast, I receive about three requests a week for copies of an EPAA article by a person who can not figure out any of the several means of obtaining a copy. It takes me about 15 seconds to email them a reprint. Scholarly Organizations             Let's consider what the ejournal movement might mean for scholarly organizations. Take AERA as a case in point.             AERA has about 20 thousand members and the average member pays $50 a year in dues, so the Association's income (not counting grants and Annual Meeting revenues and a few assorted items) is about a million dollars a year. Bill Russell tells me that about two-thirds of the budget goes to produce the Association journals (a half dozen of them); that's a bit over $600,000 a year to edit, print and ship scholarly journals. What would these figures look like if AERA chose to publish all of its journals electronically? There would be the time and talents of the editor and the editorial board and technical help for the editor (word processing and the like); this is now donated to the Association by the editor's institution- -and donated gladly since the institution is happy to have its name proudly appearing in front of the face of everyone who opens the journal. Likewise, the disk space to store the e-files for INTERNET access is a trivial item that no one would charge for (about one floppy disk per yearly volume). In short, I can easily imagine AERA publishing all of its journals electronically across the INTERNET at no cost to the membership--no cost. This is not a pipe dream; I have done it myself for two years and it can be done.             What would this do to the Association? How would it adapt? What role would it then play in the whole scholarly publication scene? These are tough questions that are currently occupying the thoughts of the AERA Ad Hoc Committee on Telecommunications, which Jane Stallings formed this past summer and asked me to chair. There are no easy answers, but I think it is quite possible for AERA to give up its paper journals and continue to perform a central role in the future of educational research. Indeed, organizations like AERA may very well play an enhanced role in the scholarly e-world. When anyone can launch a scholarly journal on a shoe-string, then precisely who does so is a matter of heightened urgency. AERA has always played a gate-keeper function in education research. When the gates swing open wide, the keeper's role will become more critical. As information explodes and dozens or hundreds of electronic resources vie for your attention, whose archive will you take the time to visit: Joe Schmo's or the one sanctioned by the Association? Libraries             The role of traditional university libraries in the e-revolution is very difficult to divine. By and large, they are sitting back, studying the situation but not acting. By history and by culture, librarians are trained to archive and retrieve text-- paper text. They are not much trained in computers and far less so on how to navigate the INTERNET. It is clear that they should be aggressively tracking, collecting and archiving the burgeoning field of electronic publication, but almost none of them are. But it will come; as soon as the first major library (a Berkeley or an Urbana or an Ann Arbor) commits itself to archiving ejournals, there will be a stampede of librarians to learn the INTERNET and follow suit. Presently, librarians seem to preoccupied with all the wrong issues that e-text presents: plagiarism (not different in any important respect from the questions that Xerox machines raised when they appeared on the scene), ephemerality of ejournals (forgetting that most paper journals have half lives equal to the morning dew), access costs (there will be none).             Libraries will be forced into the e-world by the economics of publication. Scholarly publication has increased exponentially for the last two centuries (Price, 19 , estimates that the doubling time of the scholarly literature is 10 to 15 years). The costs of printing have risen at rates faster than the general inflation rate. John Franks estimates that the cost of scholarly journals has risen at a rate of 13.5% per annum for the last decade--that means a doubling in cost every five-and-a-half years. Consequently, libraries are acquiring smaller and smaller fractions of the materials that their patrons wish to access. Their solution to this crisis is to put more into interlibrary loan; fill out a form and wait up to three weeks for a paper copy of a journal that your library can't afford to own. Concurrently, the costs of electronic storage of information have declined precipitously. I hardly need to recite the statistics for you; they are mind boggling. Andrew Odlyzko estimated that all the published mathematical work in history could be stored (formulas and all) in 50 gigabytes--a gigabyte of disk space (about 5 times the size of your typical PC hard drive capacity) now sells for about $500. Volume 1 and half of Volume 2 of my journal, EPAA, fit on one high density 1.44 floppy. No shelf storage; no dusting; no loaning and retrieving--just information at your fingertips or on your hard drive for pennies.             Currently, to obtain a copy of an article in a scholarly journal, I have to drive to campus, walk to the library, navigate the catalogue system, find the volume in the stacks, find a Xerox machine and copy pages at $.10 per copy if I am lucky and someone has not cut the article out of the book. To obtain an article from an ejournal, all I have to do is log on to the INTERNET, go to my gopher bookmark for the journal, locate the article and download it into my PC--it takes about 10 minutes and costs nothing.             A serious problem is that all this contemporary growth in scholarly communications is taking place, not within the purview of traditional academic librarians, but under the direction of "information technology" professionals. Now the latter are a flashy bunch with a strong sense of service--often more closely aligned with the values of the business world than the academy. But they lack the librarians sense of permanence, of keeping the historical record of the disciplines, of holding on to resources--librarians even call their books and journals "holdings." Ejournals now, outside the academic library system, occupy a precarious position. My journal, EPAA, essentially is archived in about five locations, four of which I could erase in a matter of about thirty minutes if I so chose. Similarly, they could be quickly and inexpensively moved and archived elsewhere if the need arose. But this type of tenuous hold on posterity is the sort of thing that gives librarians nightmares, and rightly it should. But as simple as it would be for me to erase my journal and send it to oblivion, it would be nearly as simple for many libraries to archive their own electronic copy of it and protect it indefinitely. That which makes ejournals fragile also makes them resistant to extinction. In a future of electronic archives, we can not even imagine an inferno like that which consumed the Library at Alexandria and wiped out the written wisdom of the day. Commercial Publishers             What will e-publication mean for commercial publishers of scholarly journals? It will mean that they will have to get out of the business. Some of them are frantically attempting to devise schemes of charging users for each and every access to an etext archive-- even attempting to block any file transfer or "downloading." It is clear to even a computer rookie that anything you can see on your screen, you can capture electronically. The commercial publishers can not control the wide sharing of etext, so they can't make money off of it. Some of them imagine that a commercial editorial office can add enough value to an article through graphic art and the like that readers will be willing to pay. This seems like wishful thinking, when nearly every university department office has the expertise to produce good graphics and transmit them across the INTERNET in an instant. Indeed, the commercial publishers now lag far behind the academic community in mastering the means for information storage and retrieval. In spite of the ubiquity of electronic word processing, most paper publishers are still not capable of working from electronic text and must rekey all the original text (I was amazed four years ago when I offered my publisher an e-copy of a revision of a textbook I had written and they declined, saying that they have to rekey everything anyway).             Again, universities have the incentive to "own" ejournals. They want their name in front of the public. And individual faculty in universities will happily devote their efforts to reviewing, editing and distributing the ejournals across the NET. It is not even relevant, it seems to me, to cost out the contribution of the editor's time in comparing paper publication to e-publication, since 1) the editor is not taking time away from more important activities to edit the ejournal and 2) even if we did cost out the ejournal editor vs the paper editor the ejournal editor would win (no time spent hassling with printers, correcting galleys, imploring authors to send back galleys they have sat on for a month, and the like).             Patricia Battin, formerly University Librarian and Vice President for Information Systems at Columbia University, had it right, in my opinion: "The advent of electronic capabilities provides the university with the potential for becoming the primary publisher in the scholarly communication process. At the present time, we are in the untenable position of generating knowledge, giving it away to the commercial publisher, and then buying it back for our scholars at increasingly prohibitive prices. The electronic revolution provides the potential for developing university controlled publishing enterprises through scholarly networks supported by individual institutions or consortia."             Okerson...sees more commercial scholarly epublishing with money made by access fees. This is very unlikely. It is unclear precisely what value a commercial publisher can contribute to the business of scholarly publishing. At one time, they brokered the array of services required to put manuscripts into type, print and distribute. Now these tools are owned by many--indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that they are owned by all. Commercial interests are likely to dominate book publication--as opposed to journal publication--for some time. But there is no inherent reason that books should not be published across the NET as readily as articles and monographs. Recently, a physicist in Florida announced on the INTERNET that anyone requesting a copy of his latest book (a set of reflections on the recent history of physics) would receive a free copy by return email; I got one; it was about 15,000 lines (300 pages) long; I sampled it and erased it.             Harnad (1993) disagrees with those, like Okerson who imagine a viable commercial interest in scholarly publishing on the INTERNET: "I think not. Not only do I think that the true cost of purely electronic publishing would be more like the reciprocal of the paper publishers' estimates (which are based largely on how much electronic processing saves in PAPER publication), i.e., SAVINGS of 70-80%, but I also think this will put us over the threshold for an entirely different model of how to recover those costs and create a viable purely electronic scholarly publication system. That would be a scholarly subsidy model, whereby universities (especially their presses and libraries) and scholars' own learned societies support electronic publications, in place of a trade revenue model. Such a system would reflect more accurately the true motivational structure of scholarly publishing, in which, unlike in trade publishing, authors are willing to PAY to reach their colleagues' eye-balls, rather than the reverse: In physics and mathematics, page charges to the author's institution to offset part of the cost of publication are already a common practice in PAPER publication today. In electronic publication, where these charges would already be so much lower, they seem to be the most natural way to offset ALL of the true expenses of publication that remain. That, however, is not the subject of my paper, so I mention it only in passing. One thing of which I feel confident, however, is that, in line with the real motivation of scholarly publishing, scholars and scientists will NOT accept to have anonymous ftp access blocked by paper publishers invoking copyright. Either a collaborative solution will be reached, with paper publishers retooling themselves to perform those of their services that will still be required in purely electronic publishing, or scholars will simply bolt, and create their own purely electronic publishing systems." The Medium and Modes of Scholarship             What I have done to date is nothing but the porting of the concept of the scholarly journal from paper over to the INTERNET. It has been fun, and I sometimes allow myself to think that it might even be important, but it falls short of the capabilities of the INTERNET to improve scholarly communications. With the ease and near zero costs of electronically mediated communication, scholars should be experimenting with new ways of developing and sharing ideas and information.             Stevan Harnad of Princeton University has been a leader in exploring new modes of scholarly communication--"scholarly skywriting, as he calls it. Harnad has developed an ejournal with the name Psycoloquy and a subscription list (all free, of course) of over 20,000 persons. Harnad's model involves publication and open published peer commentary. A focus article may prompt a half dozen published reactions from peers--a model that Harnad first developed at much greater expense in the paper journal known as The Brain and Behavioral Sciences.             Harnad (1993): "The scholarly communicative potential of electronic networks is revolutionary. There is only one sector in which the Net will have to be traditional, and that is in the validation of scholarly ideas and findings by peer review. Refereeing can be implemented much more rapidly, equitably and efficiently on the Net, but it cannot be dispensed with, as many naive enthusiasts (who equate it with "censorship") seem to think. "IMPOSING ORDER THROUGH PEER REVIEW "I will now describe how peer review is implemented by PSYCOLOQUY, an international, interdisciplinary electronic journal of open peer commentary in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences, supported on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association. PSYCOLOQUY is attempting to provide a model for electronic scholarly periodicals. All contributions are refereed; the journal has an editorial board and draws upon experts in the pertinent subspecialties (psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science) the world over (Harnad 1990; Garfield 1991; Katz 1991). "In addition to refereed "target articles," PSYCOLOQUY publishes refereed peer commentary on those articles, as well as authors' responses to those commentaries. This form of interactive publication ("scholarly skywriting") represents the revolutionary dimension of the Net in scholarly communication (Harnad 1992), but it too must be implemented under the constraint of peer review. "The objective of those of us who have glimpsed this medium's true potential is to establish on the Net an electronic counterpart of the "prestige" hierarchy among learned paper journals in each discipline. Only then will serious scholars and scientists be ready to entrust their work to them, academic institutions ready to accord that work due credit, and readers able to find their way to it amidst the anarchic background noise."             EPAA has a companion discussion forum, so to speak, although the forum preceded the journal by about three years. It is common for an article published in EPAA to be discussed by several persons on EDPOLYAN, a LISTSERV that deals with the analysis of education policy at all levels of the educational system. My original conception of EPAA was far different from what I have been able to bring about. My many years of editing journals--and acting as a reviewer--have made me fairly cynical about the value of the peer review. They are slow, often unconscionably so, too variable to permit drawing any kind of conclusion from a mere three or four of them, and too often sloppily done and, under the cover of anonymity, impolite. More than a few times as an editor have I edited out of referees' comments snide, cutting remarks that would bring their source a punch in the mouth were it not for anonymity. This is a human problem, as likely to emerge in the print mode as the electronic mode. (I once suggested to an editor on whose board I served that reviews would be quicker, fairer, more carefully prepared and more polite if not done anonymously. He suggested that I be the guinea pig. After an unpleasant two-hour phone call from the author of the first paper with which we tried this "nonymous" refereeing, the Editor and I gladly abandoned the reform.)             My original idea for EPAA was that it be an ejournal that would publish nearly everything sent to it after a quick screening to see that it was relevant to education policy and reasonably well formatted. The published work would enter an archive to be retrieved by interested readers, after announcement of its publication and release to a wide mailing list of its abstract. In the archives, each retrieval of an article would be counted and recorded--this is a technical problem of no consequence and it is routinely done today (in fact, I can tell you how many times each EPAA article has been retrieved from the ASU gopher in the past two years). A running tally of retrievals is kept and interested readers can check the statistics at any moment to see what is popular. Furthermore, anyone who wishes can post an addendum to any published article and explain what they like about it or what they don't like. I imagined that this system would commit far fewer errors of rejection than the current system of scholarly publication, that it would help busy readers find important work quickly without stumbling through mountains of trivia, and that it would contribute to making scholarly communication dialogic instead of monologic--which is, I believe, one of its greatest shortcomings. And nothing in the system I have described is "other worldly"; if you know the technological side of things, you know that each of the elements I have described has been standard equipment on the INTERNET for a couple years now.             Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful selling any of my colleagues on this conception of the journal. Their reactions were uniform. Neither they nor anyone they knew would want to be seen in the company of inferior work.             Harnad (1993): "INTERACTIVE PUBLICATION: "SCHOLARLY SKYWRITING" "The critical factor will be a spin-off of that very anarchy that I said had given the new medium such a bad image in the eyes of serious scholars, what had made it look as if it were just a global graffiti board for trivial pursuit: For once it is safely constrained by peer review, this anarchy will turn into a radically new form of INTERACTIVE PUBLICATION that I have dubbed "Scholarly Skywriting," and this is what I predict will prove to be the invaluable new communicative possibility the Net offers to scholars, the one that paper could never hope to implement. "I think I may be peculiarly well placed to make this prognostication. For over fifteen years I have edited a paper journal specializing in "Open Peer Commentary": BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (BBS, published by Cambridge University Press) accepts only articles that report especially significant and controversial work. Once refereed and accepted, these "target" articles are circulated (formerly only as paper preprints, but these days in electronic form as well) to as many as 100 potential commentators across specialties and around the world, who are invited to submit critical commentary, to which the author will respond Harnad 1979, 1984b). Among the criteria referees are asked to use in reviewing manuscripts submitted to BBS is whether open peer discussion and response on that paper would be useful to the scholars in the fields involved (and it must impinge on at least three specialties). Each target article is then copublished with the 20 - 30 (accepted) peer commentaries it elicits, plus the author's Response to the commentaries. These BBS "treatments" have apparently been found useful by the biobehavioral and cognitive science community, because already in its 6th year BBS had the 3rd highest "impact" factor (citation ratio; adjusted: see Drake 1986; Harnad 1984a) among the 1200 journals indexed in the Social Science Citation Index. BBS's pages are in such demand by readers and authors alike that it has (based on an informal survey of authors) one of the highest reprint request rates among scholarly periodicals and, of course, the characteristically high rejection rate for submissions -- attesting as much to the fact that there is more demand for Open Peer Commentary than BBS can fill as to the fact that BBS's quality control standards are high." Papyrophiles and Cybernauts: Who will prevail?             On the basis solely of economics, the cybernauts should prevail and paper journals--as Odlyzko predicts--should slip quickly into oblivion. But people are not solely creatures of costs and benefits. Many of my friends--who happen to be superannuated academics like myself--after hearing me rhapsodize on the advantages of e- publication, are moved to sermonize fondly on the pleasures of caressing paper, or of feeling the heft of a weighty volume of good writing in one's hands, or of even the smell of an issue of their favorite journal when they break the shrink wrap and the aroma of fresh paper wafts to their nostrils. I have memories of print as fond as any of my colleagues; my father was a printer and my grandfather was foreman of the pressroom at the newspaper. The smell of ink and newsprint are in my very fibers. But I now get as big a thrill from seeing my name blinking at me on the monitor as I did when I first held an actual journal that contained my name in print. I don't expect the differences between people who prefer paper text and people who use etext to disappear soon. Odlyzko's prediction about the disappearance of paper math journals in ten years may look foolish from the vantage point of 2004, but I am uncertain how much money I would wager against his prediction. Paper text and etext will probably co-exist in our discipline for many years. I suspect my colleagues will be more favorably inclined toward the ejournal when they find the INTERNET a more convenient terrain to navigate. Much progress is being made there. REFERENCES International Conference on Refereed Electronic Journals: Towards a Consortium for Networked Publications. Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. University of Manitoba, Winnipeg 1-2 October 1993 (in press) Harnad, S. (1993). Implementing peer review on the net: Scientific quality control in scholarly electronic journals. Laboratoire Cognition et Mouvement, Universite d'Aix Marseille II 13388 Marseille cedex 13, France .