Electronic Ecology
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Electronic Ecology
A Case Study of Electronic Journals in Context
Karla Hahn
2001
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Electronic Ecology
A Case Study of Electronic Journals in Context
Karla Hahn
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
1: Introduction
The Context: Transition from Print-based to Electronic Publishing
Developing a Study of Electronic Content
Scope of Study
Methodology
Data Collection
Data Analysis
Study Outcomes
2: Conceptual Frameworks
Scientific Communication in the Paper World
Impact of Social Factors on Scientific Communication
Diffusion of Innovations Theory
Ideas About Scientific communication in the Electronic World
Review of E-publishing Developments in Early 1998
Measuring the Impact of Early Electronic Publishing
3: Selecting a Journal
Journal Selection Decision Elements
A Model of the Journal Selection System
Decision-making Patterns Among Authors
The Role of Social Relationships
4: The Meaning of Electronic Journals
Functions of Electronic Publishing
Pros, Cons, and Concerns
Validity of Patterns Among Informant Groups
5: Journal System Structure: Quality, Audience, and Peer Review
The Roles of Journal Identity and Peer Review
A Three-tiered Model of System Structure
Peer Review in Electronic Publications
Alternate Models of Future Electronic Publishing
6: Integrating Function of the Publishing System
Integration of Published Research Artifacts
Integration of the Ecology Research Community
7: Looking Ahead Towards Electronic Publishing
The Importance of Community Context
Comparison of Author Selection and Journal Prestige Models
Study Implications
Bibliography
Figure and Tables
Figure 1. Model of Journal Selection Process
Table 1. Number of Informants Mentioning Each Decision Element by Group
Table 2. Matrix of Referent Mentions by Informants
Table 3. Ecologists’ Three-tiered Model of Journal System Structure
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Table 4. Comparison of Ecologists’ and Psychologists’ Journal System Structuring
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Acknowledgments
Karla Hahn, Ph.D.
Collection Management Team Leader
University of Maryland Libraries
January 2001
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Executive Summary
In the late twentieth century, the development and widespread adoption of the
World-Wide Web accelerated the appearance of both new all-electronic journals and
electronic counterparts of existing print journals. At the time this study was initiated in late
1997, electronic journals were still largely experimental. Little was known about their
success or how they might be developed to attract both content and readership.
In early 1998, the ecology community offered an opportunity that seemed in many
ways an ideal natural experiment, allowing me to compare a fully electronic journal with
one that was published in both print and electronic forms, both serving the same
community. The ecology community was at the very earliest stages of developing a new
communications system. Two new peer-reviewed journals were starting up in quite similar
subject areas, one electronic only, and the other publishing print and electronic versions
simultaneously, which acted in many ways as a sort of control.
I chose to focus on content development—how the authors of the manuscripts and
the editors who select and solicit material were viewing electronic publishing—an aspect of
electronic publishing which had attracted little attention. The study’s initial structure was
based on three questions:
(1) What is the decision process that authors are using to decide to publish in an
electronic journal?
(2) How do social factors influence the author’s decision to publish in an electronic
journal?
(3) How do the authors and editors working closely with an electronic journal
perceive electronic journals?
Further structure was provided by the development of the conceptual foundations of
the project, grounded in three research traditions that I found most applicable: the classic
research into scientific communication, which mostly predated the widespread adoption of
network technology, the sociology of science, and diffusion of innovations theory. Diffusion
theory was highly influential in the formative phases of the ecology case study, including
the shaping of the initial research questions and the choice of tools for conceptualizing roles
and decision processes. All three traditions highlighted the importance of a community
focus and provided points of comparison.
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Electronic publishing was the up-front context for all my discussions with my
informants, though print publishing practices were inevitably pervasive as contrasts to the
electronic discussion. Twenty-seven informants associated with the two journals provided
the main body of interviews. Editors and publishing staff from both journals were
interviewed, along with a group of authors from each journal. While the consistent
emphasis of the study was on authors and editors, five readers were also identified and
interviewed.
The research approaches I used to investigate the development of ecology’s new
journals were successful, both in answering my initial research questions and by yielding
emergent insights to the functions of a discipline’s journal system. The rich understanding
yielded by careful study of this experiment suggests that it is not necessary to wait for
circumstances favoring the creation of large quantitative data sets to begin understanding
the function and implications of e-journals.
Content analysis of informant interviews revealed nine common journal selection
decision elements that influence an author’s decision: article quality, personal obligations,
turnaround time, review process, audience size, audience character, niche, special features,
and journal prestige. These elements interact in a process that authors, publishers, and
editors described as attempting to match articles and journals.
The data support an even richer representation of the journal selection decision, an
open systems model. The model illustrates the relations between the journal selection
decision’s main entities: author, editor, manuscript, and journal, and expresses a picture of
the system that I found to be broadly shared within the ecology community. The model
embodies the key role of editors in content recruitment and journal development, a
significant study finding. The journals’ editors fit the description of opinion leaders. They
are not merely central within a network of colleagues whom they canvas for manuscripts,
but clearly play a powerful role in structuring the relationships of authors and readers with
journals.
Considering the meaning of electronic journals from the standpoint of working
scientists generated a set of key functionalities that repeatedly mentioned by informants as
integral to electronic publications. The first four, acceleration, usability, accessibility, and
quality filtering, were often related to existing functions of the print-based journal
publishing system. The second four, interaction, interconnection , online discussion, and
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cost effectiveness, describe entirely new functions and new expectations created by the
development of e-journal publishing.
In the interviews from which these functionalities emerged, all groups of informants
regularly described a simplified model of a structured journal system, usually possessing
three tiers. Breadth of audience was described more consistently as the key variable
separating tiers, as quality was recognized to vary between journals within the same tier.
This important role played by breadth of audience has been widely neglected in many
discussions of quality control and peer review.
Looking to the future of electronic publishing, two dimensions of the publishing
system that emerged from the qualitative research process strike me as particularly novel
and significant for the development of an electronic publishing system:
(1) the way the existing publishing system is structured by journal title identities, a
process that is mediated through the peer review system. While my informants
recognized that the current peer review system was time-consuming and labor
intensive, the quality filtering that they rely on results directly from the review
and journal systems. The emphasis the ecologists placed on the filtering role
suggests that publishing system models lacking journals as organizing structures
will need explicitly to substitute other features to replace this organizing
function.
(2) the integrating function of the publishing system as it creates and maintains
connections. Electronic publishing systems were exciting to ecologists, not
merely as technologies to make data accessible, but also as systems to integrate
data in new ways, in order to support new ways of communicating information,
such as models, across barriers of space and time. Going beyond even higherlevel improvements in electronic text linking, my informants suggested not
merely integration of text, but also integration of data and other information
constructs into the publishing system.
This case suggests that there is room for further work in the arena of conceptualizing
emerging electronic publishing systems. Even if a best design exists, it may not be adopted for
cultural or other reasons. In fact, it seems likely that, given the drive for open access and integration,
publishing systems serving diverse communities, while differing in significant ways, would still share
many core functionalities and allow significant integration of community publishing systems. General
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models will need to either provide enough flexibility to account for variations in communicative
practice or focus on a highly abstracted level.