Many biologists and their journal-publishing societies expect that the primary scientific literature will move to the Internet within five years. Reading an article at one's computer or printing out a reprint on one's desktop printer is more convenient and much quicker than writing and waiting for a reprint or going to a research library and finding (or, worse, failing to find) the article for reading or photocopying. Furthermore, distributing articles electronically is far cheaper than traditional printing and mailing. Finally, "e-publishing" offers additional attractions, such as low-cost color illustrations and references hyperlinked to the corresponding e-published articles or abstracts. If one assumes the change to e-publication will be made, the focus shifts to how the transition will be made and how the costs of refereeing, editing, and composing will be recovered.

A logical way to begin the transition is for publishers to offer authors the service of posting their articles on the Internet as electronic reprints. This introduces authors, publishers, and users of articles in the primary scientific literature to the process, product, and costs of e-publication. At the same time, it allows publishers to postpone hard decisions about maintaining revenues from journals published entirely electronically. With recently developed software, electronic reprints of scientific articles are economical to make and to mount on the Internet. By charging authors to put their articles on-line as e-reprints, publishers can recover all costs of the first stages of transition. By purchasing e-reprints authors can make their articles freely available everywhere on the Internet and reduce or avoid the expense and bother of buying and mailing traditional reprints.

Florida Entomologist, a refereed journal published since 1917, illustrates the accessibility and quality of electronic reprints. Starting with the June 1994 issue, all articles published in the Florida Entomologist have also been mounted on the Internet's World Wide Web (http://www.fcla.ufl.edu/FlaEnt/fehmpg.htm). The on-line articles are portable document format (PDF) files, produced directly from the files that are used to typeset the printed issues of Florida Entomologist. Once downloaded from the Internet, PDF files can be viewed, searched, copied, or printed with a free reader (Adobe Acrobat, which is also available on the Internet). A printed PDF file is the equivalent of a high-quality photocopy of the centrally printed article. The reader for PDF files is attachable to Web browsers for automated display of PDF files, and Netscape Communications Corporation has announced that their future browsers will have PDF readers already attached, just as certain graphics viewers (for GIF and JPEG images) are now.

The short-term fiscal consequences of electronic reprints are benign. Because the cost of making and mounting PDF files is low (less than $2.50 per page in the case of Florida Entomologist) and benefits to authors are high, journals might actually profit from selling e-reprints. Only if all authors publishing in a journal choose to pay for e-reprints do subscriptions and printed issues of that journal become expendable. Once that occurs, the publisher and its authors or the members of a journal-publishing society may agree that it is time to end traditional distribution of the journal. If the substantial savings from stopping central printing and mailing do not compensate for lost subscription revenue, other changes may be needed (e.g., initiating or raising page charges or reducing costs of refereeing and composing without reducing their quality). Users might be charged for downloading articles, but authors, who get no royalties and who buy and mail reprints, would likely veto or subvert that funding solution. Authors and their grants and institutions will probably pay all costs of electronic journals, much as they now do for printed journals, except that page charges are likely to be universal and high, and institutional libraries are no longer likely to contribute through journal subscriptions. However funded, electronic publishing should substantially reduce the total cost of primary scientific publication and at the same time increase and improve access to it.

Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
tjw@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu

Last updated 21 January 1997.
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