Digital evolutions in scholarly communication have benefitted readers but have not delivered on the promise they hold for authors. More radically open and inclusive solutions are possible.
In his essay “A Library for 2000 AD,” published in the 1962 collection Computers and the World of the Future, the Hungarian-born computer scientist John G. Kemeny, who would become president of Dartmouth College, argued that university libraries were turning obsolete and would basically be useless by the end of the century (Kemeny, 1968). The main issue was that libraries organized the storage and retrieval of scholarly information based on the physicality of the carriers of that information, which had become not only inefficient but actually untenable. He therefore proposed a radical reorganization that heavily relied on automation, storing books on tapes, and the pooling of resources.
Kemeny was by no means the first to be convinced that scholarly information could and should be stored, retrieved, and shared in a different way. The idealistic projects conceived by the Belgian gentleman-scholar Paul Otlet, considered to be the father of information science, at the end of the nineteenth century—culminating in the Mundaneum, which aimed at gathering all the world’s knowledge in one institution—were founded on his belief that books were an inadequate way to store information (Otlet, 1990). And decades before Kemeny, Vannevar Bush, the scientist who ended up leading the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, had already complained about how time-wasting and exasperating it had become to use university libraries, which relied on outdated and inadequate methods of transmitting research results (Bush, 2022).
Computers alone would not solve the problem. In the 1970s, Frederick Wilfred Lancaster, a professor at the Graduate School for Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, admitted that he expected little salvation from the implementation of automation if authors, publishers, information scientists, and librarians continued to think in terms of information in printed form. Instead, he appealed to them to develop a truly electronic solution that made the most of the fact that formal communication would become entirely paperless (Lancaster, 1978).
Has time delivered the solution envisioned by Lancaster? For the privileged reader, it has. If they don’t face paywalls, or if they find it easy to overcome them, students and researchers can access an unprecedented array of scholarly information from wherever they choose to work. Ejournals have become the norm, whether new publications or digitized versions of older issues, which makes finding and consulting individual articles immensely easier. And although the acceptance of the monograph in electronic form has been somewhat slower, even academic books have come a long way since Michael S. Hart typed out the text of the United States Declaration of Independence in 1971, creating what would become mythologized as the world’s first ebook (Rowberry, 2023).
But the picture is not so rosy when we look at it from the perspective of less privileged readers who are unable to scale paywalls or from the perspective of academic authors. Massive advances have been made in the way scholars research and write—think of word processors, search engines, virtual libraries, bibliographic software, and the application of AI to textual editing. But the FORCE11 Manifesto and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, both drafted more than 30 years after the call to action by Lancaster, still stressed the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by information technology, indicative that digital forms of scholarly communication have not evolved as hoped. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the digital forms of scholarly publishing that are currently mainstream have simply reproduced the processes behind the creation of paper books and journals.
It is not for lack of experimentation or technological advancement. One only needs to glance at the Experimental Publishing Compendium to be amazed by the myriad ways in which research and publishing workflows for scholarly books can be redesigned when one is willing to reconsider traditional practices determined by the physical world when it comes to remixing, reviewing, rewriting, collaborative writing, annotating, preserving, or licensing. In a recent blog post, Rob Johnson also lists three electronic publishing models that go beyond journals: deconstructed publishing (which enables the publication of components of the research process such as individual figures, data sets or code), funder platforms (which provide both nonprofit infrastructure and a forum to distribute the results of funded research), and the "Publish-Review-Curate" approach (centered around post-publication review, thus maintaining quality control through peer review without delaying the distribution of research results).
Johnson is skeptical that any of these approaches will ever replace the journal format. He may have a point, as they all center around a recommendation that has been part of the conversation for more than a century: that scholarly publishing should focus on individual items. In 1922, in “A Suggestion as to the Method of Publication of Scientific Papers,” W. J. Crozier, a prominent psychology professor best known for his work on animal behavior, declared that the journal method of publication had become antiquated (Crozier, 1922). This sentiment was echoed in J. D. Bernal’s The Social Function of Science from 1939, the groundbreaking book that discussed the impact of science on public policy and societal change. In this work, Bernal argued in more detail for abolishing journals and focusing on the distribution of separate papers instead (Bernal, 1946). Decades later, we’re discussing the same ideas.
What all of these earlier writers could not imagine is the radical openness made possible by digital evolutions in scholarly communication. As scholarly communication is no longer restricted to paper, there is no longer any technological reason (and much less of an economic one) why research results could not be shared openly with all who are interested. As Peter Baldwin put it recently in Athena Unbound: “Digital technologies allowed another step toward widely available cheap content … For the first time in history, our nonrivalrous thoughts can be conveyed through nonrivalrous media” (Baldwin, 2023).
And yet, readers seem to have come out ahead again. Any approach to open access for books or journals implies that readers have free access to scholarly publications on a global scale, provided that they have a stable internet connection. But open access based on an author-pays approach—like happens when OA is realized through APCs (article processing charges), BPCs (book processing charges), or publish-and-read deals—excludes less well-resourced authors from taking part in the conversation.
In other words, digital evolutions in scholarly communication have benefitted readers but have not delivered on the promise they hold for authors. As a result, many recent innovations in scholarly communication that go beyond books and journals feel the need to center openness and inclusivity.
If we continue to think of university libraries essentially as warehouses for books and journals, librarians will be excused from engaging with the possibilities offered by innovations in scholarly communication. But if we think of these libraries instead as actors focused on the distribution of research results, librarians should be attentive not only to the efficiencies of scholarly communication approaches that go beyond books and journals, but also to the possibilities they create for openness and inclusivity on both sides. Only in this way will they support a solution, in line with Lancaster’s vision, that benefits readers and authors alike.
Baldwin, P. (2023). Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All. MIT Press.
Bernal, J.D. (1946). The Social Function of Science. George Routledge & Sons.
Bush, V. (2022). The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (G. Zachary, Ed.). Columbia University Press.
Crozier, W. (1922). A Suggestion as to Method of Publication of Scientific Papers. Science 55 (1424): 388–89. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.55.1424.388
Kemeny, J. (1968). A Library for 2000 A.D. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers and the World of the Future, pp. 133–78. MIT Press.
Lancaster, F. (1978). Whither Libraries? Or, Wither Libraries? College & Research Libraries 39 (5): 345–57. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl_39_05_345
Otlet, P. (1990). International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge. Selected Essays of Paul Otlet (W. Rayward, Ed.). Elsevier.
Rowberry, S. (2023). The Early Development of Project Gutenberg c.1970–2000. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108785778
10.1146/katina-012925-1
