Journals: Fearing the Electronic Future

Traditional journals, increasingly specialized and expensive, soon will be
challenged by electronic rivals that speed scientific reports via computer

The editors of biomedical journals
have seen the electronic future, and they
do not like it.

‘‘What you're intending to produce,
sir, is an electronic garbage heap,”’
snapped one editor during a recent talk

_at the annual meeting of the Council of
Biology Editors (CBE). The remark was
greeted by a round of applause.

The object of the editors’ scorn stood
unshaken at the podium. A bearded aca-
demician, Frederick Plotkin left univer-
sity teaching in 1980 to found a Manhat-
tan-based company now known as Com-
tex Scientific. This fall Comtex will offer
the first of what Plotkin, its president,
hopes will become a line of some 22
electronic journals.

Despite the editors’ disdain, the Com-
tex experiment, according to Plotkin,
has already attracted $17 million in ad-
vance orders.

His methods are anything but tradi-
tional. Submissions to the Comtex jour-
nals will be refereed and on-line in the
incredibly short span of 6 to 8 weeks, the
process being further sweetened by a
$100 honorarium to the author. Stored in
a central computer, reports can then be
picked up via the phone lines by scien-
tists all over North America who are
equipped with mini- or microcomputers,
or have access to such devices at their
libraries.

The ire of the CBE members centered
on the issue of how Plotkin plans to
referee the reports, yet beneath the dis-
pleasure of the editors seemed to lurk a
darker emotion—an almost palpable
feeling of apprehension over a technolo-
gy that is creating new promises, prob-
lems, and economics for a profession
that put out its first journals during the
19th century.

The challenge is perhaps most graphi-
cally seen in terms of speed. At tradition-
al biomedical journals, a submission
sometimes waits more than a year before
breaking into print. Comtex will change
all that, and, in the process, perhaps win
the confidence of those hungry for new
information or pushing for scientific pri-
ority.

The challenge comes, moreover, at a
time when traditional journals are facing
increasingly hard times on their own
turf. Medical librarians, the chief buyers
of biomedical journals and historically a

docile group of consumers, of late have
started to vigorously fight rising prices,
overspecialization, and what they see as
a steady stream of increasingly shoddy
journals. .

Pioneering the movement away from
the traditional is Plotkin and his electron-
ic journals. In part to fend off fears,
Plotkin at his recent CBE talk empha-
sized that Comtex poses no direct threat
to traditional journals since the major
source of his materials will be progress
reports that scientists file periodically
with government funding agencies. In an
interview after the talk, however, Plot-
kin warmed to the subject of wider possi-
bilities. ‘‘There are 1.9 million scientists
out there in North America, and about 70
percent of them have access to a micro-
or a minicomputer,’’ he said with a
smile. ‘‘The amount of money we've
attracted is not surprising. We propose
to offer the marketplace a window on
research that’s being done right now. It’s
a window for which people are willing to
pay. The alternative is sometimes a 1L5-
month wait from the time of submission
to publication.”

The ‘‘alternative’’ represents quite a
large operation. In biology and medicine
alone, publishers around the world put
out some 8000 journals.

Plotkin’s challenge to the existing or-
der has already attracted some high-
powered support. Among the scientists
on Comtex’s editorial advisory board are
William Baker, a past president of Bell
Laboratories, Francis Crick, a Nobel
laureate at the Salk Institute for Biologi-
cal Studies, and Charles Townes, a No-
bel laureate at the University of Califor-
mia, Berkeley. Before founding Comtex,
Plotkin himself worked in academia,
teaching at Columbia University and the
State University of New York at Buffalo,
and writing books on the history and
philosophy of science. In 1980, while
looking for something different, he was
chairman of the English Department at
New York’s Yeshiva University.

Comtex went public last June at $6.25
a share, and the stock soared to $26 a
share before splitting 2 for 1 in Novem-
ber. It is now selling for a comfortable $8
a share. The process of going public
brought $4.1 million into the company’s
coffers. In addition, Comtex recently
bought controlling interest in the Elec-

964 0036-807 5/82/0528-0964$01.00/0 Copyright © 1982 AAAS

tronic Mail Corporation of America, an
acquisition that will furnish the company
with a ready-made conduit for its elec-
tronic journals.

Comtex is also getting ready to offer
an additional service, a computer system
that statistically predicts the toxicity of
chemicals. The service fills something of
a void, since little toxicological infor-
mation has been compiled for the 5.7
million chemicals listed by the American
Chemical Society’s registry service.

Until its products go on-line this fall,
Comtex is offering some of them on
microfiche. A subscriber this fall will still
be able to order microfiche copies, or, if
desired, print out reports at a computer
terminal. The cost of hooking up to Plot-
kin’s computers will be on the order of
$90 an hour. ‘‘It is not the most expen-
sive,’ he told the CBE audience, ‘‘but
it’s not cheap either. This is not a bibli-
ographic database, which is still a step
removed from the primary material. This
is the work itself.”

Whether the work itself will be merito-
rious was much debated at the CBE
meeting. The point of contention was the
way Comtex plans to referee submis-
sions. Members of a Comtex editorial
board, the referees for a paper, will
either accept or reject a manuscript—
without the more traditional and time-
consuming process of revision, in which
an author’s English and oftentimes his
ideas, methods, and conclusions are im-
proved and clarified. The Comtex meth-
od drew a sharp remark at the CBE
meeting from Robert A. Day, who works
at the Philadelphia-based Institute for
Scientific Information: ‘‘All of us as
journal editors would like to have a
speedier process, but those who feel we
are professionals are involved in a pro-
cess that takes time, because what is of
utmost importance to us is the publica-
tion of valid scientific knowledge, not
unevaluated, if you pardon me, garbage.
Because that’s what scientific data are
until they have been through some kind
of evaluation.”

Unruffled, Plotkin replied in sonorous
tones: ‘‘I will compound my errors by
saying we are also interested in publish-
ing work in progress, which will throw
you into even greater consternation. I
am committed to the idea that, in areas
where research is superseded rapidly,

SCIENCE, VOL. 216, 28 MAY 1982.
fresh information. is required out in the
marketplace. Even research in progress
with no conclusions is useful to the ac-
tive professional scientist.”

In any event, says Plotkin, the quality
of the work submitted to individual jour-
nals is judged by the editorial boards. So
far, for the microfiche series, the rate of
rejection has been about 60 percent, an
indication that not everything coming
under the transom is rushed into print.
‘This is our first year of publication,’’ he
said during the interview. ‘‘We can’t
afford to come out with junk, otherwise
the distinguished people who have
agreed to work with us could not afford
to associate their names with these jour-
nals.”’

The editors of Plotkin’s journals have
a variety of views on the subject of
quality control. According to Frank D.
Drake, an astronomer at Cornell Univer-
sity who is the announced editor of the
Comtex series on astronomy and astro-
physics, the nontraditional process of
review harbors some dangers. *‘Comtex
is the wave of the future,”’ he says. ‘‘But
there is going to be a great burden on
them to keep high standards or their
potential will nose-dive. Since there is no
iterative process, there is a great burden
on the editors.”’ In fact, this winter when
Drake realized the extent of his teaching
load at Cornell, he resigned as a Comtex
series editor because of the time-con-
suming nature of the job.

A Comtex editor who sees different
potentials and problems is Bruce A.
Bolt, of the Department of Geology and
Geophysics at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. “‘When you go through
the labs now you see video displays
everywhere. At the same time we have
enormous numbers of reports. My room
here is full of them. They're difficult to
classify in libraries. Some are not suit-
able for publication, although people are
always interested in the raw data, or
geotechnical studies of certain sites, crit-
ical facilities, earthquake studies, and so
on. The technology to utilize this infor-
mation is there. Whether it will be Com-
tex that puts it over the phone lines or
somebody else I don’t know. But I feel
certain something like this will take off.”’

The style and content of the Comtex
journals no doubt have yet to be estab-
lished. Whether they be for quick priori-
ty-conscious publication, or for more
leisurely work with massive amounts of
hard-to-get data, or for bulky govern-
ment reports, or for some future combi-
nation of services that differ from field to
field, the concept of Comtex itself has
“engendered much interest.

It has also attracted a fair amount of

capital—an interesting development
since the main thing Plotkin currently
offers are promises and a flair for pro-
moting his own ideas.

A factor that may influence Plotkin’s
success is the current health of the com-
petition, the traditional journals. The
field is large and seemingly sound, but
underneath the workings of this industry
are signs of strain.

The most immediate indication is that
librarians, traditionally seen by journal
publishers as captive consumers, are
fighting the escalation of journal prices

  
   

 

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and during the past few years have not
only limited new purchases but also tak-
en the unprecedented step of discontinu-
ing journals in droves and performing
user surveys to find out where to cut the
fat. Librarians complain that journal
prices for a decade have been climbing at
a rate sometimes as high as 40 percent
annually, a phenomenon especially seen
in the area of biomedicine. The cost of
many scientific journals is now several
hundred dollars a year and some exceed
a thousand. In 1975 the journal Molecu-
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annually, whereas by 1980 the figure had
risen to $430 and in 1981 it skyrocketed
to $720. The rate of inflation has far
exceeded rising production costs. As jour-
nal prices have climbed, library budgets
have been strained to the breaking point.

The overall problem, according to
Richard De Gennaro, the director of the
University of Pennsylvania libraries and
a knowledgeable critic who has written
widely on the subject of pricing policies,
stems from the psychological makeup of
librarians and the greed of publishers.
‘Librarians have a weakness for jour-
nals and numbered series of all kinds,”
he says. ‘‘Once they get volume I, num-
ber | of a series, they are hooked until
the end.*’ Seeing a golden opportunity, a
handful of large publishers over the
course of almost two decades created
literally thousands of new scientific jour-
nals.

The multiplying journals provide a
handy outlet for the steady stream of
“publish or perish’’ articles that scien-
tists sometimes feel obligated to pen. De
Gennaro quotes the verdict of two econ-
omists who studied the problem: ‘‘The
fact is that a growing proportion of scien-
tific journals have virtually no individual
subscribers, but are sold almost exclu-
sively to libraries, and that a very high
proportion of those journals are rarely, if
ever, requested by readers. This sug-
gests that many journals provide ser-
vices primarily not to readers but to the
authors of the articles for whom publica-
tion brings professional certification, ca-
reer advancement, and personal gratifi-
cation.”

It is here, in the economics of publica-
tion, that Plotkin feels his electronic
journals will have the edge. His meth-
ods, he says, can more easily respond to
the market forces of supply and demand.
Rather than a researcher paying page
charges (which are sometimes used by
traditional journals to subsidize publica-
tion and are written off against govern-
ment grants), Plotkin pays the researcher
an honorarium if the work is judged
worthwhile. Further, Plotkin’s journals
will succeed only if readers are interest-
ed in paying for access to the informa-
tion. ‘‘Scientific publishers,’ he says,
‘‘operate many of their journals as vanity
presses, but under the cloak of supreme
respectability.”

What perhaps makes the attack on
vanity operations and rising prices signif-
icant is that it is starting to come not just
from entrepreneurs such as Plotkin but
from librarians and even from scientists.
An example of the librarians’ onslaught
was recently seen at a medical collection

in Washington, D.C., where the librarian
drew up a “hit list’? of 75 biomedical
journals whose prices had risen more
than $50 between annual subscriptions.
She is now in the process of interviewing
faculty and students to see which ones
might get the ax.

The indignation of scientists also may
be growing, at least according to one,
who, as an editor, has witnessed the
growth of the literature over the years.
“Our library,’’ says James E. Heath, a
physiologist at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, ‘‘recently came
up with a fund-raising scheme whereby
alums, faculty, and students would do-
nate dollars to help maintain the journal
subscriptions. It seems a sign that this
thing has gone too far.’’ Heath, as editor
of Ecology, Physiological Zoology, and
a number of other journals, has had not a
little experience in the area of publica-
tion. ‘‘Do we really need all these jour-
nals?’’ he asks. ‘‘I think there has been a
dilution of quality, and that’s inevitable
when there are more outlets than quality
work.”

Another concern, touched off by tradi-
tional journals and possibly open to solu-
tion by computerized retrieval, is the
question of omitting tabular data. Tradi-
tional publishers, pressed for space and
often with an eye to profit, leave long
tables of data out of articles and keep
them on file, where individuals must
write for them and pay charges. Because
of the lengthy process and the cost, not a
few scientists decide not to take the
time, with the effect that the data are lost
to the scientific community. Computer-
ized journals, with their ability to store
vast amounts of information until it is
called for over the phone lines, might be
a solution.

The stage is set for an interesting com-
petition between publishers of paper
journals and the entrepreneurs of the
electronic future. Not a few paper jour-
nals have fallen into the trap of obeying
the dictates of publishers and authors,
rather than trying to serve the needs of
the reader. Librarians, who often pay for
the dislocation out of increasingly tight
budgets, are starting to vigorously fight
the trend. The electronic rivals, mean-
while, promise to obey market forces, to
pamper the reader, and to offer a wide
range of new services. All this will be
accomplished, they say, while dramati-
cally reducing the time it takes to get a
manuscript into print-—not an insignifi-
cant promise in a profession where dis-
covery without priority is almost as bad
as no discovery at all.

—WILLIAM J. BROAD