Electronic Publishing:
A Brief History and Some Current Activities

by Barbara Meyers
President, Meyers Consulting Services
and Editor, IP News

The following article was first presented at the Charleston Conference on November 8, 1996 as part of the annual Publishers Panel. The Charleston Conference has a 16-year history of bringing together librarians, booksellers, publishers, subscription agents, and other professionals concerning with the acquisition of scholarly information in particular and the entire scholarly communication process in general. Companion presentations by Susan Knapp, Director of Publications, American Psychological Association, and Janet Fisher, Associate Director for Journals, The MIT Press. Both of those papers will appear in the Internet Edition of IP News. Additional presentations of this material were made at the November 21, 1996 CAPCON Seminar entitled: "Selecting the 'Right' Medium for Your Information" (conducted with Susan Severtson, President, TextBase, Inc., whose seminar remarks will also be found in the IP News Internet Edition) and the RMTS (RCP Manuscript Tracking System) 1996 User Group Meeting held on November 23, 1996 in London, England. These remarks are not meant to be comprehensive in their treatment of electronic publishing activities, but rather were meant to serve as an introduction to those not completely familiar with the history of publishers' efforts to create viable electronic information products over the last three decades.

In the beginning, that is the 1960s, electronic publishing was defined as the application of computers to primarily the "front end" of the publishing process. As many of you know, it entailed the use of word processing capabilities and what was then called, computerized photocomposition or typesetting. These efforts were focused on the production of information products, at that time, mainly in print formats with some database development. These early applications evolved to include mark-up tools as well. It wasn't until the 1970s that the computer came to be used in the dissemination of information and electronic publishing took on a new meaning which eventually came to encompass all aspects of publishing from initial writing to final access by the reader.

Wilf Lancaster, in his article "The Evolution of Electronic Publishing" (Library Trends, Spring, 1995), notes that "electronic publishing can be considered to have evolved gradually over a period of about thirty years, the evolution having the following manifestations:

1. Use of computers to generate conventional print-on-paper publications...
2. The distribution of text in electronic form, where the electronic version is the exact equivalent of a paper version and may have been used to generate the paper version....
3. Distribution in electronic form only but with the publication being little more than print on paper displayed electronically. Nevertheless, it may have various "value added" features, including search, data manipulation and alerting (through profile matching) capabilities.
4. The generation of completely new publications that exploit the true capabilities of electronics (e.g., hypertext and hypermedia, electronic analog models, motion, sound)."

As Wilf notes, the "actual evolution is not easy to depict since all of the steps now coexist (i.e., the fourth phase of the evolution is already in place, but the first phase has not disappeared)." In fact, that is the very reason why the decision-making process of selecting the "right" medium for an information product is so challenging. For the near term, it is the general consensus of the scholarly publishing community that in order to serve the entire global marketplace, publishers must be able to provide their information in all available formats.

At the recent Charleston Conference, several publishers spoke of the need for a "duality of print and electronic products" for the foreseeable future. How many years is covered by the term "foreseeable future" is debatable. Many of us expect that it will span the remainder of our careers.

In the last year, we have seen two major initiatives in electronic publishing come to "closure" as it were, in the case of the Elsevier sponsored TULIP project, and a level of operation from which some lessons were learned in the case of the Red Sage Project. These two ventures joined a number of earlier attempts by publishers to respond to the market demands from both users and librarians that information be electronically stored and retrieved.

One of the earliest projects in exploring full-text online was what is now known as Chemistry Journals Online spawned by the American Chemical Society. With similar projects being mounted by the Royal Society of Chemistry and several European commercial publishers, the ACS efforts began in the mid-1970s as the first full-text online database in the sciences based on the then 21 journals of the Society. We learned then the first of many important lessons that was reaffirmed by the current TULIP investigation; that is, that a critical mass is essential to any positive reaction from the marketplace. Yet even with the addition of a number of other journals from sister societies and commercial publishers, such as John Wiley & Sons, the current Chemistry Journals Online has not even begun to earn back the enormous initial capital investments by the publishers involved.

The online publications of the Institute of Physics are among many current examples of electronic publications such as the Journal of Molecular Biology from Academic Press and "The Cutting Edge" electronic version of the society-sponsored publication, The Journal of Immunology. Similar online offerings are available from a variety of publishers, such as those found in Wiley Online .

Anne Dixson of the IOP, recently explained one of their newer electronic product's attributes, the hypersite feature, by saying: "It is easy to describe, but very difficult to do." That is often the case as publishers try to make electronic wishes come true and the level of difficulty may be used as a gauge for the money involved as direct costs, or certainly, in terms of technical staff who had not previously been a part of the publishing operation.

In addition to the online, Internet, and World Wide Web information sources being offered by publishers, there have been many CD-ROM products brought into existence over the last decade or so to answer demands to "go electronic." Heading the list are those in the areas of humanities scholarship from Chadwyck-Healy and the Encyclopedia of Social Work on CD-ROM issued by the National Association of Social Workers, which provides hypertext links on the CD between the Encyclopedia and companion reference works such as the Social Work Almanac and the Dictionary of Social Work. And of course, you all know the multi-publisher initiative, ADONIS. A more recent arrival is the CAJUN Project sponsored by John Wiley & Sons with work undertaken by the Electronic Publishing Research Group at the University of Nottingham which involves the electronic dissemination of articles from nine journals. CAJUN stands for CD-ROM Acrobat Journals Using Networks which is now entering its second phase of development.

Reviewing another electronic initiative moving into its second phase, the Red Sage Project, Michael Held, Director of the Rockefeller University Press, shared with participants at this year's Council of Biology Editors' annual Airlie House Retreat, the lessons that participating publishers learned from Red Sage:

We can do it.

• It took a lot longer than anticipated to accomplish.
• It was more labor intensive than envisioned.
• It was more costly than originally budgeted.
• It was more complicated -- data couldn't be sent across the country via lines but often tapes had to be sent just like hardcopy.
• It produced dual costs as both paper & electronic versions still needed to be produced.
• There are increased print costs because of the demands by the new technology for initial tagging for an electronic version along with print and the subsequent learning curve of staff.
• Electronic costs of post-processing files to create SGML and HTML were higher than anticipated especially when coupled with putting in hyperlinks and paying for loading, storage, and computer support.
• Readers demand the ability to search and have links to references which require further, sometimes costly, programming and processing.

Parallel findings are presented in the TULIP Final Report, a project where the scanned page images plus bibliographic data and unedited, OCR-generated, "raw" ASCII text of 43 and later 80+ Elsevier and Pergamon materials science and engineering journals were provided to nine leading U.S. university libraries. The report notes that "all of the participants have been confronted with the harsh economic realities of building even a prototype of an electronic journals system: on Elsevier's side, the costs of conversion and distribution; on the universities' side, the costs of implementation of their respective systems." Karen Hunter, Vice President of Elsevier, during her keynote address at the Charleston Conference shared the things that keep her awake at night and her concluding questions about "in the end, are we ... too early? too late?" plague nearly every scholarly publisher I know.

As an example of that, at the Top Management Roundtable sponsored by the Society for Scholarly Publishing held this September, one set of panelists was asked whether publishers' investments in electronic initiatives RIGHT NOW are:

a) crucial
b) prudent
c) premature.

Nearly all responded ... d) all of the above, reflecting the somewhat bemused, but brave, attitudes by scholarly publishers at this point in time.

During the earlier-mentioned CBE Retreat (aptly named "The Fate of the Scientific Paper in a Paperless Age"), editors and publishers compared notes regarding the costs that they have experienced in producing electronic publications, either online or CD-ROM versions of current print products or new "all-electronic" journals. Not a single response was less than a development expenditure of $100,000 per title and many were significantly higher. Just pause for a moment and think about what new pricing models will need to be developed to recoup such expenditures.

The CBE Retreat attendees, just like their colleagues at the SSP Roundtable only weeks earlier, recognized that all of us will need to develop strategies for survival as we cope with an inevitable "clash of culture AND technology" according to Jim O'Donnell, Interim Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania.

It is hard to remember at times, that quality electronic publication still rests on the initial production of an editorial product which entails first-copy costs driven by such activities as peer-review and copyediting along with author inspection of proofs and corrections. Only after such validation efforts are accomplished do the newer publishing activities of tagging and coding, computer graphics and interface construction, electronic distribution and file maintenance, and user training occur. While the expense of ink, paper, binding, and postage may be removed, these new functions' costs are incurred. And along with those, come more challenges for publishers to create user support and product upgrades while learning to promote in different ways and provide user education heretofore unnecessary for publishers. After all, for books and journals, there was an educational system that taught users how to read. Until schools begin to graduate computer-literate readers en masse, publishers along with librarians will carry the burden of those functions and their accompanying costs as well.

Even though some level of activity has been on-going in the area of electronic publishing for nearly 30 years, we have only just begun to deal with the myriad of issues that need resolution in order for success to be insured. Publishers are still grappling with the difficulty created by the need, as Jim Stephens of EBSCO recently said, to "keep spending on the old, but start spending on the new ... "

As Karen Hunter reported, TULIP found that "the number of academic libraries, really ready to support digital collections, is still small." Numerous articles in the library and publishing literature and as many conference and meeting presentations have talked about the need for a sufficient market in order to make electronic publishing a truly viable economic option. This will not come about until electronic publication is considered equivalent to print in terms of the scholarly reward structure supporting tenure and promotion. A computer analyst colleague of mine just recently sent me a list of 15 Project Management Proverbs and the 14th on the list read: "What is not on paper has not been said." That anonymous adage must be changed if electronic publishing is to have a future as long as the past enjoyed by print.

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