The Shaping of Electronic Media in Supporting Scientific Communication:
The Contribution of Social InformaticsRevised: May 20, 1998
Center for Social Informatics
Indiana University School of Library and Information Science
Bloomington, IN 47405
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI
A paper presented at the "European Science and Technology Forum: Electronic Communication and Research in Europe" Darmstadt/Seeheim, 15 to 17 April 1998. http://academia.darmstadt.gmd.d e/seeheim/. Sponsored by Academia Europea.
Introduction
The use of electronic media to support scientific communication is one of the major shifts in the practice of science in this era. There are other shifts the science system, such as the rise of global science, the rise of biological sciences, the plateauing of support for mega-science projects after the end of the cold war. There are interdependencies in these shifts, since electronic communication media can often expedite special kinds of communications between scientists who work across continents and 10-15 time zones while reducing the marginal costs of communication. In the scientific communities, these communications include informal e-mail, the communication of conference programs as they jell, the sharing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal articles, and the development of shared disciplinary corpuses.Today, the Internet is the primary medium of this communication. In North America, public access to the Internet has become the occasion for both discourse about and changes in ways of doing business, forms of entertainment, communication within families, and so on. As a consequence, the shift towards using electronic media as a major communication medium seems to be an inescapable imperative. The concept of an inescapable imperative has not become popular as a finding of scientific research; it is popular because it fits simple cultural models of computerization and because it is advanced in many important forums.
It is easy to give enough examples of practices such as the communication of conference programs as they jell, the sharing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal articles, and the development of shared disciplinary corpuses so that they appear to be sweeping across the sciences. However, each of these practices seems to be emblematic of specific fields rather than developing in ways that will make them universal.
It is easy to be sanguine about this differential pattern of developments. One argument is that "sooner or later everyone will catch on" and learn to use the various e-media structures in all fields. Another argument is that the variety of e-media initiatives reflects a creative period in scientific communication, and this, in itself, is a good thing. Last, some people suggest that we identify "best practices" and encourage their widespread adoption.
We see notable risks in a pure laissez-faire "let them work it out for themselves" approach. Large amounts of money, resources, and effort are being committed (by government agencies, by academic departments, by publishers, by professional societies, and by individual researchers) to the development, maintenance, and promotion of various forms of communications technologies for use in global science. However, in the absence of a valid theory of how scholarly fields adopt and shape technology, scientists and policy-makers are left only with context-free models, and hence resources may be committed to projects that are not self-sustainable, that wither, and that do not effectively improve thescientific communications system of the field. The consequences may not only be sub-optimal use of financial resources, but also wasted effort on the part of individual researchers, and even data languishing in marginal, decaying, and dead systems and formats. This paper examines how and why scientists in different fields shape the roles of e-media in their fields distinctive ways and suggests how they should be conceptualized.
The Electronic Communication Reform Movement
Electronic communication is not simply a set of professional practices; it is also the focus of a small e-publishing professional reform movement. This reform movement shares much in common with other computerization movements (Kling & Iacono, 1995; Iacono & Kling, 1996).First, it is energized and most widely publicized by a core group of enthusiasts (e.g. Paul Ginsparg, Stevan Harnad, Andrew Odlyzko, and Ann Okerson). Harnad is well-known as the editor of the electronic journal Psycholoquy, as the originator of "scholarly skywriting", a short, discursive, and iterative form of scholarly communication (Harnad, 1991), and for his "subversive proposal", a radically decentralized scholarly publishing model, in which scholars self-publish their works, which then may or may not be peer-reviewed (Brent, 1995). Ginsparg is best known as the developer of the Los Alamos National Labs Physics E-Print Server, a working paper server used by high-energy physicists (http://xxx.lanl.gov). Morton (1997) urges scholars to accept the "paradigm shift" and switch to (and form, if necessary), electronic communication, in both centralized and decentralized forms.
Second, the movement is dominated by a shared ideology. This ideology has as its primary precept that "electronic media are almost always better than traditional media, such as paper", for several related reasons: electronic communication is dramatically less expensive than alternatives; access to electronic media is easier and wider; and the systematic use of electronic can speed up scientific communication.1
The electronic scholarly communication reform movement has played a major role in encouraging scientists to take electronic media seriously as an opportunity for communication that may be faster, more accessible or even less costly than traditional alternatives. But it also becomes a source of tensions when enthusiasts (implicitly) claim that a single model for electronic scholarly publishing is appropriate for all scholarly communities ("One size fits all"). A few electronic publishing enthusiasts dominate the discourse about the subject, and thus set expectations for the potential of electronic e-media in scientific communication.
What is often left out of the mainstream discussion is a more varied and subtle set of experiments by scientists who have developed electronic media, such as electronic journals, that fit the specifics of their discipline and that use electronic media in novel ways.
For example, Holoviak and Seitter (1997) characterize their approach to Earth Interactions, a pure e-journal for earth sciences; "From the beginning, we were determined to have a journal that would do much more than reproduce electronically what could be printed on the page. Our goal has been to exploit the medium and go beyond the capabilities of the printed page. Earth Interactions authors are encouraged to include sophisticated graphics, data in electronic formats, and even useable computer code -- the same tools they use to draw their conclusions. Readers can interact with parts of the author's data and observations and thus more readily verify and expand the results presented"
In contrast, the editors and organizers of the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) sought to make the review process of articles more open for authors and readers (http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/).
The ETAI represents a novel approach to electronic publishing. We do not simply inherit the patterns from the older technology, but instead we have rethought the structure of scientific communication in order to make the best possible use of international computer networks as well as electronic document and database technologies.
Articles submitted to the ETAI are reviewed in a 2-phase process. After submission, an article is open to public online discussion in the area's News Journal. After the discussion period of three months, and after the authors have had a chance to revise it, the article is reviewed for acceptance by the ETAI, using confidential peer review and journal level quality criteria. This second phase is expected to be rather short because of the preceding discussion and possible revision. During the entire reviewing process, the article is already published in a "First Publication Archive", which compares to publication as a departmental tech report. (From ETAI, 1997; See Sandewall (1998) for a more elaborate description of their editorial process.)
The ETAI is an interesting contrast with "hybrid ep-journal" for artificial intelligence, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).(See http://www.jair.org/). Articles in the JAIR are similar in content, format and referee processes to articles in paper journals, although there can be on-line appendices and discussions of published articles. People are encouraged to cite JAIR's articles as they would articles in a paper journal. However, JAIR is distributed without charge on the Internet. (See Kling and Covi (1995) for a more complete account)2. Each of these AI e-journals values peer review, and public discussion, but also structures them a bit differently.
There are numerous other electronic journals whose editors are experimenting with new formats. These experiments are often tailored to fit the preferences of a specific disciplinary community and are relatively invisible despite their creative ingenuities. Our main point is not that a working paper server used by high-energy physicists (http://xxx.lanl.gov) is of lesser value than electronic journals. Rather, as we shall discuss, these different forums are structured in ways that are more fine tuned to the communicative practices and interests of different disciplines. This heterogeneity should be analytically understood when we characterize viable approaches to scientific communication.
Field Differences
One of the notable features about the development of e-media in science is that they seem to vary in their structure, roles and uses from one field (or closely related set of fields) to another3. This observation is robust with respect to the ways that scientists use e-mail and collections of paper and electronic journals (see Kling and Covi, 1995; Walsh and Bayma, 1996; Finholt and Brooks, 1997; Kling and Covi 1997; Walsh and Bayma, 1997). This paper advances our understanding by starting to examine the social practices that lead to the differential structuring of electronic media in different fields.The contrast between the organization and roles of electronic materials in several sciences is instructive and is one starting point for analysis4. For example, the XXX electronic working paper server (http://xxx.lanl.gov) at Los Alamos, which is used to distribute "preprints" of working papers in several fields of physics, has become important in the communications system of the field (Odlyzko 1996). Biologists, on the other hand, circulate preprints within small invisible colleges and broader access depends upon publication in archival journals. Many biological fields, however, use digital disciplinary corpora for important data sets, such as Protein Data Bank (PDB), FlyBase, and Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), which serve as repositories for genomic sequences that have been published in refereed journals.
These five fields illustrate some of the different ways that fields have developed electronic media. One way of thinking about the use of e-media to support scientific communication is to identify the set of best practices from fields like these, and then encourage scientists in all fields to adopt such practices. Thus, it might seem that particle physicists have simply stumbled upon the concept of working paper (e-print) servers, and developed a dozen prototypes. Computer scientists have stumbled upon another architecture for organizing access to their working papers via the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library -- NCSTRL (http://www.ncstrl.org) -- a distributed digital library of technical reports from major computer science departments. And soon, we should expect scientists in all fields to adapt this discovery to enhance their communications.Particle Physics Particle physicists have long been in the vanguard of electronic media use. One distinctive feature is the strong electronic pre-print culture, in which researchers submit electronic versions of papers to publicly accessible working paper servers at the time of submission to a paper journal. While the E-Print server at Los Alamos National Labs is the best-known of these electronic working paper servers in the U.S., there are about 11 others, (including the CERN preprint server at http://preprints.cern.ch/, DESY preprints at ftp://ftp.desy.de/pub/preprints/, and the American Physical Society at http://publish.aps.org/eprint/). Molecular Biology -- Model Organism Community Each model organism community maintains a shared digital disciplinary corpus of genomic and other information about the object of study. For example, Flybase (http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/) provides Drosophila researchers with access to submitted genomic data, genetic maps of Drosophila, addresses of other Drosophila researchers, fly stock lists, and a bibliography of publications on Drosophila. (The research communities for other model organisms, such as C. elegans,or Mus musculus, have similar corpi.) Molecular Biology -- Protein Crystallography The protein crystallography field exemplifies several electronic media forms. The Protein Data Bank (PDB, http://pdb.pdb.bnl.gov/) is an archive of experimentally determined three-dimensional structures of protein macromolecules. The field has also developed specialized electronic data formats (in particular, mmCIF, which is a modification of the International Crystallography Union's CIF format) which are used in representation of protein molecules, along with tools for processing of data in the CIF format. In addition, one of the high-impact journals in the field, Protein Science, has for its entire existence had an electronic counterpart, which provides supplementary material, as well the published articles themselves. Astrophysics One interesting feature of astrophysics is that much of the data comes from large, publicly- or jointly-funded sources (such as the Space Telescope Science Institute). In addition, the field of astrophysics seems to depend upon four major journals (worldwide). Publishers of key journals, Astronomy and Astrophysics:A European Journal (Springer), Astronomy and Astrophysics Review (Springer) and the Astrophysical Journal (University of Chicago Press, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/Ap J/), are publishing hybrid paper-electronic versions. (Springer's electronic journals are available through site licencing). Information Systems The information systems discipline has developed ISWORLD, an extensive Web-based collection of links, papers, course syllabi, tools, and resources that are maintained in a distributed fashion (http://www.isworld.org/is world/isworldtext.html). While the top-level Web site itself is sponsored by MIS Quarterly, the top-impact journal in the field, Information Systems scholars act as section editors for the many sub-pages of the site, resulting in an extensive, distributed but centrally accessible digital disciplinary corpus. We do not share this view, and will explain our skepticism in the following sections. It is important to note that today, not all fields support the development of electronic media. A discussion of electronic publishing will examine this reluctance in more detail.
Electronic Publishing
There is a wide discrepancy between various scientific societies in their stances towards the posting of documents on the Internet. These stances are reflected most clearly in the prior publication policies and practices of these societies -- that is, to what degree is some form of "posting a document on the Internet" treated as "prior publication" by the editor of society journals.One of the most widely publicized Internet publication policies comes from the American Psychological Association (1996) whose "interim policy" asserts:
"Authors are instructed not to put their manuscripts on the Internet at any stage (draft, submitted for publication, in press, or published). Authors should be aware that they run a risk of having (a) their papers stolen, altered, or distributed without their permission and, very importantly, (b) an editor regard such papers as previously "published" and not eligible as a submission-a position taken by most APA journal editors. In addition, after acceptance for publication, the publisher is the copyright holder. APA does not permit authors to post the full text of their APA-published papers on the Internet at this time, as developments in the online world cannot be predicted. The APA will, however, closely follow such Internet developments. The P&C Board will establish a task force in June 1997 to investigate developments and recommend a longer term APA policy."Lest the APA embargo on Internet posting seem anomalous, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has a similar policy with respect to the Journal of the American Chemical Society:"As stated in the Notice to Authors of Papers submission of a manuscript to the Journal implies that the work reported therein has not received prior publication and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere in any medium, including electronic journals and computer data bases of a public nature. The editors and the advisory board have established a policy that any material that is posted in electronic conferences or on WWW pages or in newsgroups will be considered as published in that form, in the same way as if that work had been submitted or published in a print medium (American Chemical Society, 1996)."These policies, incidentally, stand in contrast with the practices of some other fields, such as computer science and particle physics. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s interim copyright policy, for example, does not homogenize all forms of posting on the Internet, nor does it declare the posting of a document at any stage of development as equivalent to publishing. In part, the ACM's Interim Copyright Policy states that:"ACM intends to be the author's agent in reaching the widest possible readership and protecting the author's interests against plagiarism and unauthorized copying or attribution of an author's work. The ACM grants authors liberal retained rights including unlimited reuse of the work with citation of the ACM publication and the right to post preprints and revisions on a personal server (ACM, 1995)."ACM sees its role not as the sole provider of a work, but rather as a facilitator of wide readership access, and maintainer of the "version of record"of the author's work. Only the "definitive", published paper need be maintained on the ACM Web server.The ACM policy parallels the practices found in the particle physics community as well. When an author submits a paper to a journal for publication in particle physics, the author typically posts the document at the time of submission on one of many publicly available working paper (or "e-print") servers. This document is then available for others to read, even before it has been received or reviewed by the journal.
MIS Quarterly, a high impact journal in the Management Information Systems field, represents yet a different practice. Authors of articles to be published in MIS Quarterly may post article drafts on their own Web pages, with explicit notice that these drafts are "pre-prints", and are thus not the official, "published" versions of the paper. Links to these drafts are collected on a Forthcoming Articles page on the MIS Quarterly Web site. However, once the journal issue is available, the author's draft must be taken down from the author's personal Web page (MIS Quarterly Web Site, 1998).
Conceptualizing Field Differences
Why have different fields adopted electronic media in different forms? The title of this paper that is listed in this conference program, "The influence of information technologies on scholarly/scientific practices and communication," implies that the major differences would be differential adoption rates for similar technologies.>From an information-processing perspective -- a perspective that considers only the technical features of the various media --, all of these forums -- pure electronic journals, databases, preprint servers, and pe-journals, are essentially equally valuable in all disciplines. They all are said to reduce the costs of communication, expand the range of people and locations from which materials are accessible, and generally speed communications. As scholars in all scientific fields work with data, and communicate both formally and informally with other scholars, all of these electronic media forums should be adopted and used fairly uniformly.
Fields do differ in some obvious ways based on the work products of the field. For example, computer-scientists don't generally work with shared, static-but-growing datasets, while molecular biologists frequently do. Therefore, it is not surprising that molecular biologists work with a number of shared digital disciplinary corpora, while computer-scientists do not. On the other hand, all scholars communicate formally. While pure electronic journals have been established in some areas of computer-science such as AI and mathematical theory, they play a negligible role in the communication systems of molecular biology.
Questions like these are part of a larger systematic body of research about information technology and social change. This body of research, called social Informatics, has found that technological determinism has not been a good basis for understanding these processes (see the Social Informatics Home Page http:www.slis.indiana.edu/SI).
Social Shaping of Information and Communication Technologies
These between-field differences in the scientific communications system suggests that the communications system of a field, and therefore the use of electronic media in that communications system, is socially shaped. Social Shaping of Technology (SST) (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985) is a theoretical stance that views technologies not as autonomous causal agents driven by an internal, features-based technical logic, but rather as products of human creation and use. The configuration of socio-technological ensembles is driven by a series of operational choices (conscious and unconscious) made both during the creation and during the implementation of the technology. The configurable nature of many technologies -- particularly ICT -- enables this shaping to continue during their use (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992; Williams, 1997).Characterizing the Social Shaping of Scientific Communications Systems
We can characterize the basis for these field differences in terms of each field's articulation of some key issues faced by all scholarly fields: First, the allocation of credit for work performed; second, selection of target audiences for research; third, access to resources, including data; fourth, speed of work and results-sharing; fifth, allocation of professional status. [expand] The manner in which each field deals with these issues are both socially shaped and strongly institutionalized5.Trust plays a central role in the articulation of these issues by different fields, in two different senses.
(1) For scientists to be willing to read or use a report, they must be willing to trust that the report is legitimate (and that the study reported is competently executed and worth the time to learn about). Formal peer-review is only one of many processes of legitimation. Particle physicists and astrophysicists, for example, are more willing to use working papers than are molecular biologists or sociologists.(2) Conversely, scholars who are willing to share materials (data, working papers, research reports, etc.) must have enough confidence that the sharing will not hurt their own career advancement or future access to resources. For example, if a scientist publishes a paper in a low-status pure electronic journal, will this be considered a "wasted publication" from a career-advancement perspective? If a scientist posts a working paper in advance of publication (or even acceptance for journal publication, as is currently done by many physicists), are they taking a risk that someone else will either (a) plagiarize their work, or, more commonly (b) take their work further, more quickly, and produce a higher-impact report?
We suggest that the social conditions that lead scientists to shape their communication systems can be expressed in terms of four important (and overlapping) structural characteristics of their fields.6
Research Project CostsThe overall costs of a project may have several effects on the communications system of a field. First, it may tend to increase collaboration, as it becomes difficult for any one researcher to mobilize the resources necessary to perform the research. Second, it may increase visibility of the work. Third, many specialized extra-murally funded research institutes establish stronger ongoing controls for publishing research results, even as working papers. Institutes as diverse as CERN and the RAND Corporation are known for their internal reviews. High cost (multi-million dollar) research projects usually involve large scientific teams who may also subject their research reports to strong internal reviews, before publishing. Thus a research report of an experimental high-energy physics collaboration may have been read and reviewed by dozens of internal reviewers before it is made public.
Mutual Visibility of Ongoing Work in the Field
Our pilot studies indicate that productive scholars in some fields are more aware of the work that others in the field are doing than those in other fields. For example, most productive physicists are well-aware of the large-scale, high-cost collaborations in their field, and well in advance of its eventual publication in a journal. At the opposite end of the scale, most sociologists are unaware of the ongoing work of other sociologists beyond their own close colleagues until they read about the work in a journal. If the ongoing work in a field is relatively transparent to others in the field, it may be that the risks associated with sharing reports and data may be less.Degree of Industrial Integration
Industrial collaborations, especially those that may readily result in income from patents and trade secrets, may put pressure on academics to be more conservative about data-sharing.Degree of Concentration of Communication Channels (especially journals)
In some fields, a few journals serve as outlets for the vast majority of high quality published research while other fields routinely spawn specialized new journals. For example, astrophysics relies upon 3-4 major journals worldwide, while neurology relies upon well over 100. Research studies that are published in a few journals hat are read by most scholars is much more likely to be visible than research that may be scattered through numerous journals.How Disciplines Shape Their Communication Systems
Williams (1997) posits a tension between two sets of oppositional forces: those that tend to stabilize technologies and those that tend to destabilize them. The destabilizing forces emerge both from advocates of technological innovation and from the changing needs of diverse groups of participants. Further, the increasing configurability of information and communications technologies (as opposed to, for example, mechanical industrial technologies) widens the potential for shaping IT in use. This insight from the SST position is consistent with our observations that a highly configurable technology such as the World Wide Web can be adopted and used by different fields in dramatically different ways. The implication is that the shaping of technology is highly specific to and emerges in reaction to the dynamic needs of specific communities, such as the active participants in scientific fields.New ICT organized with computer and telecommunications systems enables some people to communicate more rapidly, for a wider variety locations, and sometimes at low marginal costs. This value -- enhanced communication -- is one value that scientists value. It's important to note that people's preferences about who to communicate with whom about what is highly contextualized. Scientists who may wish to have their published articles widely and rapidly read may also be reluctant to have drafts of their manuscripts or notes about new projects similarly available for a larger community. Enhanced communication is not an absolute value in scientific fields. Scientists often want know about recent findings and new theoretical developments as it may effect their own research strategies and practices. Scientists are also concerned with receiving credit for their contributions, and to have such credit reflected in their status, career prospects, and abilities to obtain research resources and good jobs. These values can conflict in different ways in different scientific fields.
Scientists have worked out ways of resolving these conflicts in traditional media. As a consequence, when scientists computerize traditional media, they are readily organized in ways that protect traditional concerns. Thus, for example, scientists are more willing to accept the electronic versions of paper journals (such as Science), than to accept new pure electronic journals (Kling and Covi, 1995). Similarly, high energy physicists had clearinghouses for sharing working papers. Electronic versions, such as xxx.lanl.gov and the CERN preprint server are relatively uncontroversial extensions of these services. In drosophila research, a book of DNA sequences (The Redbook) was developed in the 1960s. Flybase, its electronic version, was also non-controversial This pattern of translating traditional forms in electronic media is predicted by institutional theories.
It is important to note that many of these electronic translations are not simple replications. They can include numerous value added features, and capture some of the gains of IT -- in more rapid communication among specialists in the field.
But not all of these translations survive. For example, some molecular biologists who study the worm c.elegans created an online Worm Community System. It proved to relatively complicated and made many technical demands upon its users (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). It was abandoned, but was replaced by a web-based system , ACEDB - "A C. Elegans DataBase" (http://probe.nalusda.gov:8000/other/aboutacedb.html) that was much more workable, in terms of fitting the technlogical work routines of biological researchers.it was replaced by ACEDB, first on CDs and then as a WWW-based resource.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science spent about $2 million to develop an Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, and sold it for 15% of that cost several years later. It now appears to be inactive. Many biologists invested in the Genome Database (GDB), a database that supports the mapping phase of the Human Genome Project (Letovsky, 1998. However, its financial support has been withdrawn because its funders do not see adequate value for their constituencies. These are just a few high profile examples.
Over time, say the next century, we should expect many new kinds of electronic forums to support scientific communication. It is not hard to find de novo creations today, such as pure e-journals or shared disciplinary compendia, such as ISWORLD (see above) and GDB. There is a risk that these innovative e-media may not thrive nor survive. While ISWORLD seems successful today (based on a growth of contributions), GDB is being closed down. In addition, many pure e-journals struggle to attract high quality articles and an effective readership.
It is likely that some conventions of scientific communication will change in the next decades, especially when they can be organized to preserve or enhance trust and bring other benefits as well. We suspect that fields will differ in the ways that they shape e-media because trust issues work out differently with respect to characteristics such as those that we have identified above (ie., visibility of projects to others in the field, industrial integration).
Conclusions
This is a relatively early period in the development of electronic media to support scientific communication. It's important to view many of today's adventures in electronic publishing as experiments. Since 1990, scientists, publishers and librarians have initiated thousands of electronic publishing ventures, include new electronic journals and disciplinary databases.Some of these have thrived, while others have not developed sustainable support. Most of these systems may have seemed highly promising when they were initiated. Short lifespans are not unique to electronic journals and on-line databases. Some fraction of paper journals are also disestablished after a few years if they don't "catch on" with authors, readers and subscribers. But should do our best to capture the benefits of electronic media without paying unnecessarily high experimental costs or "losing scientific reports" that are published in what soon become disestablished and little visited electronic islands.
One key principle for good scientific theories of systems developments is that they should be conceptually rich enough to understand or predict failures as well as successes. The information-processing theories that fuels some of the most strident evangelism about electronic publication do not satisfy this criterion. The history of discourses about appropriate forms of computerization is littered with utopian visions that do not effectively engage the complexities of the social worlds of the likely users of new technologies (Kling and Lamb, 1996). The empirically grounded research approaches of Social Informatics give us more plausible alternatives (see Kling and Star, 1997).
Our specific approach examines electronic media comparatively and as shaped by the social practices that support trustworthy communications in diverse scientific disciplines. This approach is media-independent, empirically accessible, and gives some promise of helping us better understand what it takes for scientists to organize electronic media to effectively energize their communication in practice.
Acknowledgments
The research reported here was conducted with support from the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. This paper benefitted from helpful comments byProf. Erik Sandewall and from continuing discussion abut scholarly communication with Prof. Blaise Cronin. In addition, we are indebted to numerous scientists who have discussed their publication and reading practices with us since 1994.Endnotes
1. It is interesting to note that both Harnad's "subversive proposal" and Ginsparg's E-Print server bypass peer-review (although Harnad also values peer-review and discusses a way of augmenting his "subversive proposal" to include peer-review) (Brent, 1995). (back)2. This contrast is not meant to say that ETAI is necessarily better for AI researchers than JAIR. Rather, we observe that there are sometimes differently structured new electronic media in the same field, and that their viability and value cannot effectively be assessed by inspecting a description of their design and rationales.(back)
3. The precise boundaries and scope of a field are usually ill-defined -- any given researcher at any time may read across fields, or publish in journals read by other fields. (back)
4. Crawford, Hurd and Walker (1996) have also discussed the use of electronic media in different fields. However, they concentrate on describing different practices in fields such as chemistry, high energy physics and molecular biology, without asking why the practices of these fields differ so substantially.(back)
5. New Institutionalism is particularly helpful in this analysis. This is a cognitive approach to organizational behavior that posits that many choices of organizational actors are governed by highly routinized habits, scripts, rote actions, and imitation of elites; these routinized actions are conditioned by and reinforced by centralized institutions. New institutional theories posit that a legitimacy imperative -- a need for actions to be seen as culturally legitimate -- serves as the primary source of organizational inertia (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). (back)
6. We have identified these structural characteristics from our previous research, including interviews with scientists and scholars in about 10 disciplines.(back)
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