The future of IMS journals

Jim Pitman

Departments of Mathematics and Statistics

pitman@stat.berkeley.edu

From the IMS Bulletin, Vol 32, Issue 1 (2003).

It is now clear to everyone involved in the production of scholarly journals that the primary medium of communication is rapidly changing from paper to electronic. See Not worth the paper by Martin Rees, in New Scientist, 23 November 2002. It is also clear that some effort will be required to ensure that this transition is made on terms which are favorable to the academic community rather than multinational information providers. To that end, it is imperative that a digital record of as much as possible of human knowledge be securely placed in an international collection of interconnected public archives. In Two rules for scholarly communication: publish for the public, and keep the journals, I argue that to achieve that end, the value of existing public archives should be enhanced by building over them a well-organized network of digital overlays on the existing and rapidly expanding system of interoperable public digital repositories, such as the arXiv, California Digital Library, and DSpace. Such a network could be easily navigated for knowledge retrieval. This public knowledge network can be built, while preserving the valuable existing system of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, by two complementary strategies:

1) restructuring existing journals as electronic overlays of suitable public archives;
2) creating a new family of similarly structured electronic survey journals.

In The Mathematics Survey Proposal I indicate how the survey journals can be constructed in mathematics, starting with survey journals in probability and mathematical statistics, which I expect to be supported by various professional societies including the IMS and Bernoulli. The purpose of a survey journal is to provide an account of the current state of development of a branch of knowledge in the form of lucid, broad, expository papers, both on established subjects, and on subjects which are developing fast and hold great promise. In other words, to provide the trunks, branches and stems of the forest of knowledge whose leaves and flowers are the research journals.

For the whole system of electronic research and survey journals in a field to achieve its full potential, and convey knowledge of the field to the broad public defined by Internet access, it is essential that articles be properly linked, without interruption by gates or tolls. As remarked by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, in Links and Law: Myths,

On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head.

Already, this problem is limiting the effectiveness of electronic communication achieved by the current IMS policy of posting electronic copies of its Annals behind gates at ProjectEuclid. Compare this with commercial aggregate journal databases such as ScienceDirect, where thousands of articles behind the main gate are interlinked. For scholarly societies to compete effectively with the multinational information providers in the electronic era, I believe the societies must fully embrace the new electronic paradigm of free and open publication to all with Internet access, and agressively develop the public domain of communication until that is the dominant one, and what is distributed in any other domain is of marginal importance.

I therefore propose that IMS should proceed as follows.

fully endorse and encourage the new paradigm of Free Online Scholarship.
find an adequate platform for free electronic distribution of all its current journals, and any new electronic journals, by cooperation with a major public digital library which will take archival responsibility and offer searching and linking facilities comparable with those of commercial information providers.
seek collaborative arrangements with universities to provide financial commitment for support of the production of such journals, where the incentive for the universities, already appreciated by most librarians and university administrators, is that if the universities do not provide such arrangements, the society journals will eventually by squeezed out by the monopolostic power of commercial information providers.
continue with paper publication of journals only to the extent that there is demand from members and libraries, with the understanding that the quality and prestige of the journal is something independent of whether the primary medium of communication is paper or electronic.

Of course, many details remain to be considered by IMS executives in making such a major transition, which should be done only after serious deliberation. But as a small society with a large number of high quality journals, the IMS is in a position to play a leadership role in reversing the current trend toward privatization of the digital representation of knowledge, and its members should support its executives in doing so.

File translated from T_EX by T_TH, version 3.13.
On 10 Dec 2002, 13:19.