Moving to an online world involves a number of issues for the profession. For example, how might electronic publication affect the quantity of economics papers and journals? Although technology has made it easier to write papers, especially joint authorship (using networks rather than hard copy systems), it still takes a substantial amount of time to write a paper and the underlying reasons for writing one more paper have not changed. Our guess is that the quantity of output of economists is unlikely to substantially change. However, the number of journals could either rise or fall dramatically. With space limitations no longer a constraint, prominent journals could choose to expand in size, or perhaps once papers are be posted to a well-known archive, prominent economists will follow their physics brethren in not bothering with paper publication. These trends would reduce the number of journals. Conversely, it is possible that the low costs of electronic publication could cause a number of specialized journals to spring up.
Indeed, it seems plausible to us that electronic publication could be the savior of many journals that are either highly specialized, or appear at the middle or lower levels of journal rankings. Many libraries, under great budget pressure, are now canceling subscriptions to these journals. Without the opportunity to maintain broad availability at lower cost through online publication, many of these journals could fold, much as the scholarly monograph market has in other areas of academia.
A number of issues revolve around the question of how readers will find the material they are seeking in an networked world. Consider the E-Print Archive with some 16,000 submissions per year, all of which are available on your desktop computer. Economics certainly produces a similar number of working papers each year. Just because you don't receive all of them does not mean that you have an optimal selection method currently. At least with online distribution, we can eliminate one inefficient selection mechanism--the cost of hard copy distribution.
Journals will probably provide one important selection mechanism. After all, most of the value of a hard copy journal is in its refereeing and editorial process and this will not change; online journals will provide the same services. In addition, an online journal can assure the reader it has the most up-to-date or final version of an article, along with any comments on it. More importantly, current hard copy journals, due to publication lags, provide little selection for current (less than a year old) research. As online journals will least avoid publication lags and backlogs of the hard copy world, their selection services will be far more timely.
There are other means of search and selection than by journals. For example, notification lists can be sent by e-mail, either from a server or directly from the author. Electronic search mechanisms can easily be set up to search by JEL subject category or by a group of keywords. Electronic journals could count how often its papers are accessed, or how often they were cited in another paper. Another possibility would use the feedback from earlier readers as a guide for later ones. Readers could rate papers or articles, and you would consult the ratings to limit your search of interesting articles. Such a system has existed on the Net for movies since 1991 (Internet Movie Database); more recently WiseWire (general web filtering) and FireFly (music) have appeared and more are under development (Varian, 1997), including one for academic articles (Varian, 1996).
While many hi-tech solutions have been proposed, it is interesting to note that on the E-Print Archive at Los Alamos, there are no such selection tools, in spite of more than 1,300 submissions in a month. Apparently, physicists have little trouble sorting through this number to find what is interesting and important. Finally, although navigating the online world is sure to have its frustrations, these should be placed in context. After all, current methods of finding material are messy as well; waiting for working papers or journals to arrive, talking with local and remote colleagues, checking the JEL, and visiting the library. Even an imperfect online world will likely be preferable to the present.
Yet another cluster of issues revolve around whether online journals will maintain certain levels of quality. Anyone can start an online journal, while hard copy journals require significant startup effort. As with hard copy journals, authors will submit to and readers will read online journals that have high quality articles and they will ignore those that do not. The reputations of online journals, however, will depend more heavily on what they publish than who publishes them. Also, how will promotion, tenure, and annual review committees regard electronic publications? The United Kingdom has legislated that in review of grants, electronic publications must be weighted equally with hard copy publications. In the hard copy world, authors are willing to revise a number of times because without such revision, their paper does not receive wide distribution through a journal. But if wide distribution is possible without such revision, the pressure for honing an article may be reduced. While pressures for high quality and hence reputation will likely prevail, the transition may be bumpy.
For the short run, mixed paper and online journals are likely, with the online versions simply being an electronic version of the hard copy based journal.6 Libraries and publishers tend to see the online future as simply adding another distribution method to their customers.7 Librarians see one more demand on their budgets from paper journals who charge extra for the electronic version. However, we believe that in the long run something like Harnad's model of widespread online journals is both plausible and desirable. If that model comes to pass, then the current business model of libraries and publishers--which is based on paying for subscriptions--must change.
Finally, there is the obvious problem in the online world of making connections to the ``installed base'' of paper journals. The Mellon Foundation has funded some interesting work with JSTOR where they have taken back issues in a number of economics, ecology, political science and history journals and used optical character recognition (OCR) technology to create electronic versions. Details can be found in Varian's paper in this issue.