INFORMS News

President's Desk

Saving Trees

The main business of a professional society is communication. Within INFORMS our scientific journals permit researchers to learn about each other's results and build on them. Our journal of practice, Interfaces, tells what works and what doesn't in the real world. OR/MS Today, our magazine, keeps us up to date broadly about developments in our field and external events affecting us. Subdivision newsletters put section and chapter members in touch. Our professional and scientific meetings encourage members to talk and listen. And job placement activities put employers in contact with our job seekers.

As we approach the end of the 20th century, the media for conducting these communications are in great ferment, driven by advancing information technology.

Here I shall focus on what is happening in print media: the journals and magazines. In doing so, I shall draw heavily on analysis done by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and described by Denning and Rous [1984]. Their paper has been distributed to the INFORMS Board by Jim Bean, our vice president for Information Technology, who is leading INFORMS policy development in electronic publishing.

The greatest challenge from the technology is to research journals. The reason is simple: low readership. This does NOT mean that they lack value. As the scientific enterprise has amply demonstrated over the past 150 years, the tiny number of experts who read, understand and build on any one article can, in aggregate over a scientific field, generate great impact. But, as costs have escalated and content exploded, we must ask: is there a better way?

Practice-oriented publications like Interfaces and OR/MS Today have much higher readership and so their costs are easier to justify. High readership also makes advertising feasible. Advertisers pay the cost of OR/MS Today. For practice-oriented communications, the major question is: do electronic media offer new opportunities? We certainly think so. Practice Online is a web page experimenting with services to provide new value to practitioners.

Research publication is a complex system headed for change. Traditionally it has involved: (1) preparation of the paper, (2) submission to a journal, (3) review and revision, (4) acceptance, (5) copy-editing, typesetting and scheduling for publication, (6) printing and mailing, and (7) archiving and indexing. Curiously, for the journal publisher, the huge amounts of labor spent on paper preparation, reviewing and journal editing are free, or very nominal in cost. Typesetting, printing, mailing and marketing comprise the main out-of-pocket costs. Since most technical papers are prepared on word-processing software, electronic publication on the world wide web offers the possibility of eliminating a remarkable portion of the direct costs.

The complexity, however, comes from the social system. A publisher like INFORMS takes major responsibility for finding top editors and creating and maintaining a subscription base. Furthermore, the "free" labor exists only because publication enhances the author's prospects for promotion, tenure and prestige. By means of refereeing and editing, journal publication provides a certification of the quality of the author's work. The more prestigious the journal, the more valuable the certification.

But the traditional publication system is suffering from breakdowns, including: (1) increasing criticism of research that is narrow and theoretical by practitioners who are genuinely seeking valuable input for applications but are giving up and dropping subscriptions, (2) author dissatisfaction with publication delays, including long backlogs of accepted papers, (3) an increasing tendency by authors to post their papers on Internet servers long before publication and often before submission, thereby bringing into question the novelty of the eventual printed versions, (4) copyright issues surrounding web postings vis-a-vis the journals, (5) library budget cuts, leading to dropped journals, even as the number of journals and their prices continue to escalate, (6) libraries moving to "just-in-time" acquisition, made possible by searchable databases, regional cooperation and document delivery systems, (7) academic promotion pressures leading to increasing submissions to the most prestigious journals even as their readership decreases, (8) authors viewing their documents as "living on the web," subject to continuous improvement and capable of enhancement by hypertext links to other documents.

Indeed, the posting of documents on the Internet is blurring the meaning of the traditional steps of submission, acceptance and publication. Publication may, in effect, precede submission, acceptance tends toward pure certification, and printed publication decreases in importance.

If these are the forces, what should INFORMS be doing? First of all, we are not of a size to be a major software or system developer. That's OK - there are plenty of organizations wanting that role. We should instead try to be smart implementers. Print is not going away overnight but we should immediately prepare for electronic media. A first step will be to have papers submitted in electronic form. This should be done as soon as possible and has several advantages. First it can reduce typesetting costs. Second, it facilitates putting papers in SGML (standard graphical markup language) and starting an electronic depository of our journals. Such a database will have machine-searchable text. This creates new value. The database can also be put on an Internet server when we are ready to provide web access.

Next we shall learn much from our upcoming electronic publication, Interactive Transactions in Operations Research and Management Science, and our expanding activities on Informs Online. We shall continue to track the activities of other societies and investigate opportunities such as providing our subscribers with Internet access to accepted papers and providing non-subscriber access to INFORMS articles for a fee.

In such ways we plan to produce better services at lower costs than heretofore possible. This should also save a few trees from the chipper.

References
1. Denning, Peter J. and Bernard Rous (1984), "The ACM Electronic Publishing Plan," Association of Computing Machinery, .