A friend is busy trying to persuade the publisher of an old-line journal to put the back issues online, and the publisher has a predictable response, albeit one that you hear less and less of these days: if I put the journal (substitute article, book, etc.) online people won’t pay for it. Variation on the theme: if you give away the cow, people won’t buy the milk.
Here is the compressed case for going online:First, if it is true that people won’t subscribe if it is avaiable online, this surely doesn’t apply to back issues of journals, which are not part of subscriptions in any case. One- or two-issue moving walls are common and non-objectionable (though there is a strong case to be made against them as well!).
Second, there turns out to be no strong empirical support for the idea that online and offline journals are necessarily substitutes, and not complements. This long study by Jordan J. Ballor in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing makes this point. In both journals and books, the online version enhances the value of the offline version and visa versa.
Third, there is something very odd going on when a nonprofit supposedly dedicated to getting ideas out to the world decides, as a matter of policy, to withhold ideas from people pending payment when, in fact, the marginal costs of providing that information to people approaches zero, as they often do on the web. If there are large and growing revenues stemming from an offline-only system, one can see a case for the status quo, but that hardly applies to any publication nowadays. Offline-only, nonprofit publishers are losing money so they might as well try something different.
Fourth, these days, a journal without a serious web presence is threatened with extinction by irrelevance. In contrast, a journal with a large and vibrant web presence just might discover that it had previously underestimated the exent of its market. This is certainly what the Mises Institute has found. The market for libertarian and Austrian ideas does not number in the hundreds or thousands but in the hundreds of thousands and millions. In order for that potentional market to find you, you must exist in some other way than through hard-copy only.
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This is certainly what the Mises Institute has found. The market for libertarian and Austrian ideas does not number in the hundreds or thousands but in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
I haven’t actually heard anyone say this (probably because I’m “part of the problem”), but I bet many “serious” academics resent the LvMI’s influence via the web. E.g. “people without real credentials can write whatever they want on that site and thousands of investors read it!”
Gee, is it safe for Austrians to rely on empirical support?
The online market for magazine subscription is huge, which opens doors to millions of customers all around the world as to potential investors. Also, it’s availiability and right advetisment will increase the sales of the paper version as well due to the cross-elasticity of demand.
Having recently tried to obtain copies of an extensive reading list for graduate school, I have to say that I can’t imagine what scholarship was like without the web. Even with great resources like JSTOR approximately 10% of my syllabus had to be photocopied from the library (which took forever) and another 5% I simply could not find access to. As a student trying to publish work, I would hate to think there were people out there actively seeking my writings only to meet failure.
If it were not for journals being online, I cannot imagine how much more difficult academic research would be. I have a stack nearly a foot tall of printed out journal articles in my dorm room. Although I do subscribe to Journals now, it would be hard to imagine my doing so when I was 10 years old when many of the articles were published. Not to mention the hassle of having to photocopy the journals at the library that charges well more than kinkos.
And of course the central point, as made by Jeff Tucker, is why do you publish a journal in the first place? Certainly not to become rich, but to get the ideas out. If there is a cheap way to do such, why not?
I do not subscribe to any journals (online or offline), but I may in the future.
I don’t know how I could have otherwise heard about the QJAE or the JLS than through the web.
Now that I know about these, and can peruse previous issues, I may be willing to purchase a subscription, whereas without the web, I never would have even known of the journals’ existence.
There is an entertaining diatribe on this topic in the book “Faster Than the Speed of Light” by physicist Joao Magueijo. He describes the physics journals as backward-looking, narrow, sectarian, and obstructionist. These days, he says, once a paper is accepted by a journal, the author uploads it to a well-known physics paper site. All physicists scan this site looking for relevant papers, and when they see one, they download it. The only function of the journals at this point is to serve as the imprimateur of quality through the refereeing process and to chew up lots of paper. They are on their way to becoming irrelevant, in Mageuijo’s opinion.
I’m with Dan. I just took my prelims, which required me to collect somewhere around 100 papers. After about $50 worth of photocopies, $30 worth of interlibrary loan, and asking nicely for an author in Japan to airmail me a copy of his article that I could not get anywhere else, believe me, online journals are a wonderful thing. From talking to other grad students, I think that when it comes to some class papers, if an article cannot be found online they start asking themselves if they really, really, really need it. Scientific journals are also now working on getting back issues online back to the 80s or earlier, which I think is really important for making sure older but valuable research doesn’t slide into oblivion because libraries can’t keep every journal going back 30 years. Journals whose older content is still very relevant might want to consider that.
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