Previous sections examined how networking may change our profession's access to data, journals, and working papers in the near future. But, looking further ahead, other changes may occur in these or other areas, such as teaching. Some of the changes discussed in this section seem fairly certain, but others are frankly speculative.
Currently, journals are constrained by the medium they are distributed and stored on--paper. While it is a very convenient and time tested medium, it does possess limitations. For instance, color is quite costly to use. Connections within and between papers, such as endnotes and references, range from distracting to difficult to use in hard copy versions. With electronic journals and papers, a reference becomes a clickable entry, and notes can be pop-up items rather than something at the bottom of the page or end of the paper.
Some display technologies are simply impossible, such as movies or animation. While animations sound like a silly thing to use in an academic paper, think how changes in the yield curve over time could be displayed with an animation where each second a new day's curve is shown. With an electronic journal, all these technologies are possible and even easy--color is as easy to display as black and white, hyperlinks are a natural replacement for footnotes and references, and animation is quite common in multimedia.
Besides an electronic journal displaying dynamic material, the information in the journal itself might become more dynamic. Other scholars could link their comments to a journal (perhaps only after the author prepared a response, with the author having the last word). Thus journals would more closely mirror the dynamic information they represent. As an example, in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics , Albert, Frieze, and Reed (1995), was submitted on April 25, 1995, and accepted in about two weeks. The authors posted a comment in late May, 1995 and a mistake in a proof was noted (in a fairly lengthy comment) in September 19, 1995. In the hard copy world, it might have been a year or two before the mistake was published and even then, most readers of the original article would fail to see the mistake as it would appear in a separate issue without any possibility that the original issue could forward reference the latter publication.
With links to papers, counting citations becomes
integrated. That is, in an electronic journal, not only will an
article contain references to other works, but links to that same
paper also would be available instantly. This will make moving
through the literature much easier--one could move forward just as
easily as backward.
It might even
lead to new ways of valuing scholarship, where citations are valued
more highly than the placement of the paper. Indeed, it might even
lead to an unrefereed literature. A more general version is Harnad's
(Harnad (1995)) ``scholarly skywriting,'' which he defines as ``rapid
electronic interaction,'' that ``allows authors to interact directly
with their peers at a tempo that keeps pace with the speed of thought
(paper publication being hopelessly slow for it, and spontaneous
speech, as in a live symposium, being perhaps too fast...).'' It
is already being used to good effect in
PSYCOLOQUY. Thus,
besides the usual journals and working papers, networks might usher
in new forms of scholarly communication.
Poor communication between referees and authors seems to be a common complaint. Perhaps technology could offer a solution consistent with the academic tradition of blind reviewing--the anonymous remailer. Such e-mail systems take incoming mail, strip off all identifying information, and then forward it to the intended recipient. As an example, consider:
An author posts her paper on EconWPA, and then fills out a web form for submission of the paper to a journal. The form is processed by software at the journal site, and it uses the information from the web form and a database of referees to select potential referees and to assign a manuscript number. The referee information and manuscript number are e-mailed to the editor, who then selects two referees. The manuscript number is sent to both referees and the author(s), and the referees access the paper on EconWPA. With some limits, the referees and author(s) use the manuscript number to send e-mail to the journal site which then redistributes it anonymously to the author(s) and referees jointly. It is archived so that the editor can view it at her leisure. The author(s) may `prompt' the referees for a timely report from time to time, but more importantly, the author(s) and referees can `discuss' the problems in the paper, in-line rather than with such referencing as ``at page 4 line 8, such and such...'' Since all referees receive the same information, a joint decision can be reached, which is forwarded to the editor.
With such a system, the refereeing process is faster and does not involve any administrative expense at the journal. It may even reduce the work of the editor since the referee and author can correspond directly if need be. No secretary need be involved in transmitting the reports back and forth. In addition, it would give referees an added incentive to be careful since the author could query them on their review. The pieces of this technology are in place now. In the future, anonymous ``talk'' and writing sessions could be used, and even anonymous audio sessions where the voice is distorted to keep anonymity will be possible. All of this will provide a faster and better review process.
To unambiguously date their work, academics could adopt ``digital time stamps.'' This technology could reduce the sometimes fracas debates over when ideas were developed and would even be a weapon against plagiarism. See Haber and Storentta (1992), Surety Technologies, and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). However, the greatest deterrent to plagiarism is notoriety--electronic working paper archives with notification and search technologies provide the easiest means to greater notoriety, and hence the greatest deterrent to plagiarism.
Besides communication within the profession, networks could aid communication with our students. Networks facilitate interaction, between students and teachers, both intra- and inter-class. Initial experiments have been encouraging (Manning (1996)). In addition, networks provide a convenient forum for smaller papers and ideas for teaching.