Forward to the Electronic ArchiveAuthor(s): William GardnerSource: Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Nov., 1990), p. 359Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062826 .

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FORWARD TO THE ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE

William Gardner University of Pittsburgh

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Electronic Publishing

I am encouraged by the consensus among the commentators about the goals and much of the design of the archive: agreement among diverse experts is needed to move forward. Nevertheless, many topics require more thought.

Fox and Stodolsky criticize the idea of a centralized archive. I argue for a centralized archive for two reasons. First, a hypertextual system with ad- vanced information retrieval facilities and journal-quality production values must enforce a standard discipline on the construction, storage, and cataloging of electronic documents. Second, users need to be able to work with documents as if they were all in front of them on a

single shelf. Access to documents must be quick, reliable, and transparent; users cannot be burdened with the details of

finding documents in odd corners of the network. What is needed is a way to achieve the coherence and discipline of a centralized research library in a decen- tralized network connecting many elec- tronic publishers and archives. The re-

quired synthesis is an interdisciplinary electronic publishing system that, as Fox

suggests, is open but virtually central- ized. Yankelovich's wide-area hyper- text, information agents, and on-line ref- erence services will be part of the glue with which we will assemble this net.

As Yankelovich and Fox describe, we

can see the foundations for the construc- tion of the necessary technical standards that will replace ASCII text. But even Fox's magisterial review does not ad- dress the most difficult question about the archive, the one that Hunt raises: how will it sustain itself? Continued re- search on electronic libraries can be con- ducted with federal research support, but how will we support the continuous investment required by a system that will, eventually, shunt all scientific data and literature through computing net- works? How will we finance student and public access? Stodolsky suggests that the cost of producing and distributing electronic documents will be negligible, and while I hope he is right, like Hunt I doubt it. Like Kintsch, I find amateur self-publishing unacceptable, and expect that journal-quality electronic docu- ments will continue to require profes- sional publishing services. If so, publish- ers (scientific societies or entrepreneurs) will need to obtain a return for their ef- forts, and some kind of property rights for electronic documents will be essen- tial. Some would argue that it is precisely a decentralized network that is most in need of market organization (Miller & Drexler, 1988). But I find little consensus about either the legal or technical foun- dations of intellectual property rights on the networks. Unlike Harnard, many ob- servers believe that the copying of elec- tronic documents is a fundamental prob- lem. (See Johnson [1985] and Liebowitz [1985] for discussions of the costs and benefits of the copying of documents.)

As Hunt reminds us, the scientific

publication system is a social organiza-

tion as well as a technical apparatus. Harnad and Stodolsky want us to think broadly about the networks as mecha- nisms for facilitating scientific collabora- tion and they provide stimulating pro- posals for new collaboration technolo- gies. The networks will provide much more than media for communication; they are our new desktops, offices, and meeting halls. We need to think now about how science will change and, above all, how we want it to change, be- cause, as Hunt notes, there are signs of decay. We need discussions that will clarify our epistemic, ethical, and politi- cal views on how and why we do sci- ence, because many challenges will arise.

Fox's call for collaboration among scientific organizations in research and development of the electronic archive is exactly on point. What will move us for- ward now is the participation of many scientists in debates about this future, and the commitment of major scientific organizations to begin planning it (Gard- ner, 1990).

Correspondence and reprint requests to William Gardner, Law & Psychiatry Re- search, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pitts- burgh, PA 15213; electronic mail to wpg@vir- ginia.edu or wpgl@unix.cis.pitt.edu.

REFERENCES

Gardner, W. (1990). Electronic journals: Choices for the scientific community. Presentation at the discussion of Electronic Journals: The APS Role at the 2d Annual Conference of the Amer- ican Psychological Society in Dallas, TX, June 10, 1990.

Johnson, W. (1985). The economics of copying. Journal of Political Economy, 93, 158-174.

Liebowitz, S. (1985). Copying and indirect appropri- ability: Photocopying of journals. Journal of Political Economy, 93, 945-957.

Miller, M., & Drexler, K. (1988). Comparative ecol- ogy: A computational perspective. In B. Hu- berman (Ed.), The ecology of computation (pp. 51-76). New York: Elsevier.

VOL. 1, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1990 Copyright © 1990 American Psychological Society 359

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