...Plus la Même Chose

In the last editorial (‘plus ça change’—[1]), we briefly looked at some of the major changes in scholarly communication, and how some things hadn’t changed at all. This lack of change has frustrated all of those progressives who feel we’ve not even begun to take advantage of all the opportunities offered. It’s easy to sympathise, when you think of all the things we can now do with electronic systems. I hinted then that I might take a closer look at the scholarly or scientific paper itself. Why has it changed so little? My perspective is not that of a scientist, but that of a publisher and researcher who has spent a professional lifetime dealing with papers, and even reading some of them . . . Over the last few years I’ve had occasion to read over 300 new research papers with a view to looking at their English, and sometimes their structure, and, if anything, it’s reinforced my views. First, an anecdote. I well remember a time, more than 20 years ago, when we were pioneering electronic journals, as they were called (electronic versions of journals, really). We were quite excited about introducing a video clip in a paper—what a performance it was (not the clip, just getting it in the system so it could be viewed!). As I recall, it was a short sequence of a flame developing—an excellent illustration of what the paper was describing in mathematical terms. It was one of the very first uses of video in a conventional scientific journal. Of course such things are commonplace now. But so much more is now possible. Why hasn’t the multi-dimensional, multi-media, even multi-contributor (i.e., in addition to the original author) ‘living’ paper taken over? I think there are two main reasons, which I’ll get to in a minute. First a short, but I hope relevant digression. Researchers have perhaps three main roles in scholarly communication: as authors, as referees/reviewers, and as readers. Perhaps these are not as clearly demarcated as they once were, but they are still there. They do not act in the same way in each role. They have quite different priorities in each role. As readers they are mainly seekers of information looking for those things that will help them in their research (and by extension, in their role as authors). Historically, librarians’ contact with the researcher has been mainly in that seeking role—quite rightly. This does colour how they have seen the literature. We know readers will look at the literature and individual papers in all kinds of ways. Having found a paper, they may just scan the abstract, the figures, the equations, the formulae, the references, or any combination. This leads to calls for ‘deconstructing’ the papers into their constituent parts, since this, it may be argued, is what the researchers really need. Fair enough, as long as this is not pursued to extremes such that the original complete paper is lost, since that neglects the researcher as author, as well as the dedicated reader (who might just want to read the whole thing). So why have papers fundamentally changed so little? Of my two main reasons, I believe the first may well disappear or be less persuasive over time, but the other will not. Here goes: