This document discusses the future of digital-only journal publishing and some of the possibilities and challenges involved. It notes that scholars prefer journals that are easy to skim, portable, searchable, annotatable, ingestible, and printable. However, current journal production workflows focus on PDFs, which do not support interactivity or portability well. Emerging pressures from scholars' usage patterns, production challenges, and market forces will likely lead to journals that are produced using automated HTML workflows, available in multiple formats, and put the needs of scholars first across different stages of research. HTML may become the canonical format over PDF as it allows for more flexible options.
5. •$200k in year 1
•30k articles submitted in 2013
•100+ journal clients (100% retention)
How do scholars use journals?
6. •$200k in year 1
•30k articles submitted in 2013
•100+ journal clients (100% retention)
How do scholars use journals?
Skim
Search
Portable
Annotate
Print
Ingest Interact
7. Consumer demands
• Skimmable - easy initial read
• Portable - collecting files
• Searchable - within and across articles
• Ingestible - bibliography software
• Annotatable - notes and analysis
• Interactive - links to trace sources
• Printable - close reading
8. Why printable?
• Long-form monographs (like books) often
preferred in physical form
• BUT journal articles are shorter
• So article printing should be outsourced from
publisher to consumer - hence printable
10. UChicago library study (2013)
“Periodicals only in electronic form;
books in print form. I find it very hard to
read books on the computer. However, I
like reading books on Kindle and citation
issues are being corrected, so if Kindle-
compatible electronic books become
available, life would be beautiful.”
– Faculty, Social Sciences Division.
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/surveys/2013/2013-faculty-survey-final-report.pdf
11. Paper going away?
Mangen http://bit.ly/1sYiH4t, Benedetto http://bit.ly/1MZ6vht, Cohen http://bit.ly/1FFnBwB
• E-ink might reduce visual fatigue -
Benedetto et al, 2013
• Tactile experience of reading
important, annotation (Mangen 2013)
• Hybrid digital/printed future seems
likely in short term
• Digital in long term (Dan Cohen,
March 2015)
12. Challenges for journal PRODUCERS
• Time consuming to make different versions
• Workflow is not automated
• Print concerns dominate workflow (PDF)
• Interactivity and portability are in opposition
• Metadata not always clear => discoverability
problems
• Metrics not always tracked
13. “While these files in particular are great HTML files,
they take quite a bit of time to create as I learned
one Friday afternoon last month when the editor
and I sat down to try to create them ourselves!”
Jennifer Laherty, Digital Publishing Librarian for IUScholarWorks
https://blogs.libraries.iub.edu/scholcomm/2012/04/16/16-beyond-the-pdf/
“trying to get by and do good work without
spending a lot of time and money on the format
of the output and so we resort to what seems
good enough and people like: the PDF."
Challenges for journal PRODUCERS
14. Journals of the future will be…
• Easy to make different (compliant) versions
• Publishing workflow automated
• HTML version is canonical, print concerns are
secondary (or tertiary)
• Interactivity and portability are in harmony
• Metadata is clean => better discoverability
• Metrics automatically tracked
15. The (journal) Article
• Journal ARTICLE is the primary research unit,
not journal volume
• Publishing a single article is less onerous
than volume (or multiple journal volumes)
• Rolling publication has many advantages
• Institutional adoption hurdle: major process
change (less so for individual journals)
16. Market pressures
• Open Access growth
• Alternatives: libraries, platforms
• Canceling subscriptions: UNLV,
UParis V, UMontreal
• Mission of university and societies
• Price transparency
17. Material collected from a blog post by Timothy Gowers
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/
http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographic-view-of-gowerss-elsevier-expose
20. Consequence: HTML
• Less $$ —> intense pressure for
efficiencies
• More noise —> pressure to boost signal
• Digital WILL reduce costs as seen in
other industries: books, music, news
• HTML development environment more
active than XML
26. Technical implementation
• Work across devices, available in
multiple formats
• Saveable and printable
• Linked data
• Ingestible and discoverable
• Easy to make
45. “popular eReader
formats such as EPUB
and MOBI are HTML and
CSS under the hood.”
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/07/
designing-for-print-with-css/?
utm_source=html5weekly&utm_medium=email
46. •Be available in different formats
•Have interactive elements, online
and offline
•Address scholars’ needs across
the research lifecycle
•Be eminently readable
•Be digital-first
Future journals will…
47. False dichotomies
1.Portable vs interactive
2.Digital vs print
3.HTML vs PDF
4.Publisher vs consumer
5.Streamlined vs options
52. • Pressures lead to HTML automation tools
• Software competition will reduce cost of tools
• Article-level workflows will abound
• Platforms reduce silos and churn, will
emphasize standardized inputs (metadata)
• Greater incentive to in-source journal work,
easier to bootstrap (libraries!)
Extrapolations