Los Alamos National Laboratory
CONTACT: Jim Danneskiold, 505-667-1640 / [email protected]
PHYSICIST FANTASIZES ELECTRONIC KNOWLEDGE NETWORK
ANAHEIM, Calif., Jan. 24, 1998 - On Paul Ginsparg's fantasy island, the Internet was invented long before scientists' work was shackled within the chains of scientific publishing.
On this digital isle, electronic overlays lead novice scientists through the seminal work in their specialties and gently help the general reader to an understanding based on the best research in the field. New discoveries reach the scientific community as soon as the data is analyzed and submitted electronically. Researchers, authors and reviewers add revisions, corrections and links to new research constantly and instantaneously.
And there are no printed scientific journals.
In 1991, Ginsparg started to realize this fantasy when he set up the e-print archives at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Today, at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, he charted the course to this island of the future across the perilous seas of present-day publishing.
"I want people to imagine how our research communication infrastructure would function if scholarly communication had developed after global electronic communication networks, and didn't have to evolve from a pre-existing paper phase," Ginsparg said.
This global, unified archive can serve as a model for the rest of scientific research communication, providing maximum efficiency at far lower cost than the current partitioned paper journal system. The journal of the future will provide structure to primary research through a collection of analytical links, or retrospective overlays, whose role is to give the researcher or interested layman contextual and educational information about work in the field.
A big advantage of such a unified global knowledge network is that authors can write fewer papers because such a research database unified by retrospective overlays will serve as a one-stop shop for scholars.
Now that the tools needed to build this new archival world are on-line, Ginsparg argues that the current model for scientific publishing is unlikely to survive.
"Today, scientific publishing is funded through research libraries, which in turn are funded by overhead on research grants. Publishers will have to learn to provide intellectual added-value to an openly distributed database optimized for researchers," Ginsparg said. "The big question now is not whether the scientific research literature will migrate to fully electronic dissemination, but how quickly this transition will take place."
Ginsparg set up the automated e-print archives at LANL in 1991 out of frustration with the slow pace at which existing publishers were adapting to the electronic networks in use within the physics community already for over a decade.
The e-print on-line database, which is funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, swiftly became the way that researchers communicated their work in high-energy physics and related disciplines. In the last three years, it has expanded into condensed matter physics, astrophysics, mathematics, computer sciences and a dozen other areas.
Today, the e-print archives processes many millions of electronic transactions each month from 50,000 users in 100 countries. Last year, the archive received 25,000 new submissions. By contrast, the American Physical Society, the largest single publisher of physics journals including the Physical Review A-E and Letters, publishes about 10,000 articles a year.
The e-print archives not only provide a faster and more efficient research infrastructure, but also one that is far more cost-efficient. Besides the wasted trees and the library shelves that groan under the weight of scientific journals, some subscriptions cost more than $10,000 a year and publishers on average receive $4000 in revenue per article. The cost for the e-print archives to process and make available author contributions in perpetuity is more than 1,000 times less.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. -30-
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