June 1999
E-Publishing Comes to INFORMS
By Mark S. Daskin and Kathye Long
The world of publishing is undergoing a revolution whose effects on society are likely to be as great as were those of the development of the printing press. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press democratized the distribution first of the Bible and rapidly of all other learned texts. No longer were texts confined to the hands of the clergy and elite; now anyone could have access to such volumes. This in turn led to the demand for education of the masses and, in many ways, to the democratization of much of the Western world.
For centuries, however, the publication of printed matter remained a capital-intensive process. While anyone could have access to volumes of material once it was printed, the technology and economics associated with printing placed curbs on the amount and nature of printed matter available to the public, notwithstanding Amazon.com's claims about needing massive warehouse space. To publish, writers still needed to have their material approved by editors who judged its commercial (and technical) merit.
Electronic publishing and the Internet are likely to reshape society in general and professional societies in particular in equally profound ways. These technologies have democratized the publishing business just as the printing press democratized the distribution of the written word. Now anyone with a personal computer and access to the Internet can publish anything they want to disseminate. With an investment of only $1,000 you can make your ideas available to tens of millions of people across the United States and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And the number of people you can access has been growing at exponential rates over the last decade. While this growth rate will eventually taper off, e-publishing and the Internet truly allow anyone on the planet to be their own publisher. Editors and commercial interests no longer limit what is available to the public.
It is too early to estimate or forecast accurately the profound impacts that e- publishing will have on society at large. This, of course, has not deterred professional prognosticators from taking a stab at such predictions. It is not too early, however, to begin thinking of the ways in which electronic publishing will reshape professional societies in general and ours in particular. In the remainder of this brief article we will outline the short-term and longer-term changes that we foresee. As with all forecasts, they are simply that: educated guesses about how the future will unfold. We welcome your comments and suggestions as we chart a course through this rapidly evolving environment.
Right now
E-publishing has arrived at INFORMS! You can now access any and all of our 1999 publications for free on the Internet. Simply visit INFORMS Online (IOL). Look for the Publications page, and, from there, you will be able to access INFORMS Pubs Online. It's as simple as that! Log in as a guest, and you can have access to any of the papers we have published or will publish this year four weeks before they become available in print. Try it; we think you will like it. With only a few clicks you can search our 1999 papers by author, by title or by topic. You can view lists of papers published in each issue of the journals. You can quickly scan abstracts of papers you are interested in. You can download and print any papers of interest to you. And, during the remainder of 1999, all of this is free.
Why is all of this free? Getting this material up and online is a rather massive undertaking. Creating the underlying searchable databases and moving files from our compositors to our electronic publishing partner has required significant planning and work. It is more important to INFORMS that we get the process right now rather than extract every possible dollar of commercial value from the exercise. You can help in this by trying the system and sending us your comments, concerns, suggestions for improvements, and wish lists for future enhancements.
Short-term changes
Not only has the process of going electronic required the work of many of the INFORMS volunteers, professional staff and contractors — it has also been expensive. There really is no free lunch, even on the Internet. A virtual pizza will not satisfy one's hunger very long, though it might be great for those of us on a strict diet. Thus, our experiment with free electronic dissemination of our publications will be limited to roughly six months.
Beginning with the 2000 subscription year, access to the full text of our papers will be limited to subscribers only. As a member, you will be able to receive a journal of your choice with your membership dues. You will be able to elect to receive the journal in either printed form as you have in the past, or you will be able to receive it electronically only. For a nominal additional fee, you will be able to receive both the printed and electronic versions.
As a member of INFORMS, you will be given a personalized ID and password with which you will gain access to the electronic publication system. You will be able to search the entire database as before and you will be able to view titles and abstracts of any of our papers. In fact, this will be the same form of access available to anyone worldwide who elects to log onto the system as a guest. The full text of the papers will be limited to subscribers to specific journals. If you subscribe to the electronic version of Management Science, you will be able to download and print any paper in Management Science. Furthermore, you will have access to all papers published in Management Science from 1999 through the current subscription year. Thus, next year, you will have access to the 1999 and 2000 papers in Management Science. By the year 2005, you will have access to seven years of Management Science papers just by subscribing for a single year. The benefits of membership and electronic subscriptions will grow with time.
How many times have you looked in vain for a particular issue of a journal on your shelves only to realize that you lent it to a colleague years ago and have never seen it since? With the electronic version of back issues (at least back to 1998) available online, these problems will disappear. You will simply download the paper you want. Also, those of us with years of back issues of Operations Research, Management Science, Interfaces and other journals on our shelves will be able to liberate valuable shelf real estate by relying on the electronic copies of the journals.
In addition to having access to the full text of papers in journals to which you subscribe, you will also be able to purchase individual papers from other journals on a per-paper basis. However, we anticipate that a second subscription option will be more attractive to individual members. For the price of roughly two additional journals beyond the one you receive with your membership, you will be able to have access to the full text of all our online journals.
Long-term system enhancements
Our plans for electronic publishing do not end with putting papers online. Soon, as a member, you also will be able to search a database of references from our papers. If you are reading a paper by Tom Magnanti, for example, and find that he references a paper by Amedeo Odoni, you may conclude that other papers that reference Odoni's work might also be of interest to you. By searching this new database, you will quickly find other INFORMS papers that reference Odoni's paper. Of course, you will be able to view the title and abstract of such papers, and download the full text of the papers in one of the ways outlined above. As the database grows, the value of this resource will grow immensely.
We also anticipate providing members with individualized research alerts. You will complete a menu specifying the sorts of papers you are interested in. For example, you might want to know about any paper published in Information Systems Research as well as any papers in other journals that have either the word "information" or the word "database" in the title or abstract. On a periodic basis, perhaps weekly, you would receive an automatically generated e-mail message listing the publications that meet your personalized specifications. The message will contain links that will allow you to link to papers of interest to you immediately.
A final invitation and thank you
Clearly our plans for electronic publishing are evolving. We have tried to venture into these uncertain waters in a judicious manner, selecting those facets of e-publishing that we thought would be of most value to the largest set of our members in the near term. We welcome your comments and suggestions for improving the service we are providing. Are you having problems using the system? What sorts of changes and enhanced capabilities would you like to see? Are there ways of searching that would be particularly valuable to you that we are currently not providing? Would you want a CD-ROM version of our papers at the end of each year, and if so, how much would you be willing to pay for it? Would online discussion of papers be a valuable asset, and if so, should the comments be reviewed before they are posted? Would you want INFORMS to scan back issues (prior to 1998) of selected journals? If so, which journals are most important to you? How far back should the scanning go, recognizing that this, too, costs money?
Please send your comments to the e-mail address listed on the navigation bar. We will do our very best to respond to your ideas within the limitations imposed by our finite budget but seemingly inexhaustible supply of volunteer enthusiasm. And speaking of that volunteer enthusiasm, we want to conclude by thanking two individuals whose vision and efforts have been instrumental in this process: Art Geoffrion and Michael Trick. Geoffrion motivated many of us to think about ways in which the Internet can improve our society. Trick, editor-in-chief of INFORMS Online (IOL), has, together with his faithful associate editors, put in countless hours in making this project and other Web-based products available to all of us. To both of you and all the other volunteers who have helped get us to this point, many thanks!
| How to Reach Online Journals It's a simple procedure to log into our online journals. Follow these steps:
Our online journal site is still evolving. If you have difficulty accessing Pubs Online, please check the Pubs page on IOL for additional instructions. |
Mark S. Daskin is INFORMS Vice President of Publications. Kathye Long is INFORMS Director of Publications.
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