The tiger in the corner

In recent years, many thousands of words – at meetings, on email discussion lists, and in books and journals (including this one) – have been written and spoken on how the possibilities of electronic publishing and dissemination are changing the business models for journals and, in particular, on the perceived threat from all flavours of open access. Yet all of these discussions seem to assume that the basic functions of journals, which Henry Oldenburg and his colleagues described in 1664/5 – registration, dissemination, archiving, and certification1 – and thus, their form, will continue more or less unchanged. The concerns tend to focus on business models – and open access publishing, at least, is to my mind just another business model. Yet I would liken this to worrying about the spider in one corner of the room, while in reality there is a tiger in the opposite corner. We need to turn round and face the tiger! The tiger – the real challenge to all those who are involved in supporting the processes of scholarly communication – is the way that researchers’ very behaviour is being utterly transformed by the power of ICT. It is not simply a matter of turning the journal as we know it into a collection of online documents – even one that it enriched by new possibilities of navigation and linking. And nor is it simply a matter of being able to sell access to that collection in completely new ways – from national licences for whole collections of journals, down to ‘pay-per-view’ access for individual articles or even parts of articles. Rather, we need to understand how ICT is transforming the kinds of research scholars can do, how they do it, and how they communicate with each other about it. Scholars have access to computing power on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago. This enables them to carry out completely new kinds of research – collecting vast bodies of data and then processing them, in complex ways, with incredible speed.2 For example, in the area of ecology, scientists around the world collect, share, and use data on climate, earthquakes, and many other aspects of our environment; sociologists are able to use vast quantities of population data;3 astronomers collect and analyse data from radiotelescopes in many countries (and, indeed, in the ‘seti@home’ project, invited the public to put their personal computers at the service of the massive analysis involved to detect any signs of potential extraterrestrial intelligence4). What is more, scholars are able to work in new ways. Where they used to work with a necessarily small group in their own laboratory or university, electronic communications now mean that both the collection of data and its subsequent processing can be distributed around the world; more and more research teams are widely spread in different centres and even in different countries, but they can collaborate and communicate perfectly easily. In one study, multinational authorship of journal articles was found to range from 13% in surgery to 55% in astronomy.5 How researchers communicate is also changing; they are becoming comfortable with a wide range of different modes. The options used to be limited to discussions within your own lab; presenting your ideas at conferences (first as a poster, perhaps, and later as a full paper), and ‘Q&A’ and informal discussion with other delegates; distributing preprints to those who requested them; and eventually publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. But this continuum is changing in very important ways. The informal stages are becoming far more important, at the same time that (some would argue) the final, formal stage is being eroded. Preprint databases have long existed in some disciplines, and are now being encouraged (by funders, by institutions) more widely. But a preprint is still an early form of a formal article; far more significant, to my mind, are the ways in which the informal and often bidirectional modes of ‘chat’ through blogs,6,7 wikis,8 bookmarking9 sites and the like are being adopted and adapted by the research community. Here, discussion of one’s ideas and one’s work is ongoing; others’ thoughts Editorial 163