In the near future, computer networking is likely to change our profession's access to data, journals, and working papers. This section discusses changes that are further off. Some seem fairly certain; others are frankly speculative.
Currently, journals are constrained by the medium of paper. While paper is convenient and time tested, it also has limitations. For instance, color is quite costly to use and motion is impossible. With an online journal, color is as easy to display as black and white, and animation is straightforward. While animation sounds like a silly thing for an academic paper, consider how changes in the yield curve over time could be displayed with an animation where each second a new day's curve is shown--see Holden for an actual example. Another example is the animation of complicated graphs, as illustrated by Daniel, a complete interactive intermediate micro text. When graphs are animated with changes in key parameters, the underlying concepts are much easier to understand.
Another limitation of paper is that connections within and between papers, such as references, citations, and endnotes, range from distracting to difficult-to-use. With online journals and papers, a reference becomes a clickable entry, and notes can pop up rather than lurking at the bottom of the page or end of the paper. In a world of online journals, this change can be far-reaching. For example, not only can an article contain references to past works, but also a list of works which cite it. For example, the abstract page of E-Print Archive is Schoutens et al. (1993) offers ``refers to'' and ``cited by'' links, where ``refers to'' is a link to the usual sort of references within the paper, while ``cited by'' is a link to papers that cite this paper. There are 30 citations there, nine from papers written in 1996, and 29 available online. It takes only a moment to click backward and more importantly forward through the literature. In effect, the Social Science Citation Index is built into the article--automatically. This may even lead to new ways of valuing scholarship, where citations to a paper are more valued than the original place of publication. At an extreme, this can even lead to an unrefereed literature, which would be a literature where the quality evaluation is made by readers after publication rather than by referees beforehand.
Online journals also offer the possibility of linking present articles to future comments and references, and thus ushering in a new style of scholarly communication. For example, in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Albert et al. (1995) was accepted and put online in early May 1995. The authors posted a comment in late May 1995 and a mistake in a proof was noted in a comment on September 19, 1995. In the hard copy world, it might have been a year or two before the mistake was published. Even then, most readers of the original article would fail to see the mistake as it would appear in a separate issue, and the original paper issue cannot refer to a later publication. But in an electronic journal, present comments can refer back to a past article, and past articles can refer ahead to future comments. A more general version of this interaction is Harnad's 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...).'' This sort of interaction is already occurring in Psycoloquy.
Communication patterns between referees and authors might shift considerably as a result of online journals. Consider a refereeing system based on an anonymous remailer; that is, an e-mail system which takes incoming mail, strips off all identifying information, and forwards it to the recipient. For example, say that an author posts a paper on EconWPA, and then submits the paper to a journal by filling out its online submission form. The form is processed by software at the journal site, which assigns a manuscript number and identifies a set of potential referees. The referee information and manuscript number are e-mailed to the journal editor, who selects two referees. The manuscript number is sent to both referees and the author, and the referees access the paper on the archive. They use the manuscript number in reporting back to the journal, whose software archives their comments, forwards them to the editor who can then automatically forward the comments to the author. Now the referees and the author could communicate anonymously by sending e-mail to the journal site, which redistributes it anonymously. More importantly, the author 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...'' Notice that this refereeing process involves little administrative expense at the journal; no secretary need be involved in transmitting the reports back and forth. In the future, anonymous ``talk'' and writing sessions could even be used, and even anonymous audio sessions where the voice is distorted to keep anonymity will be possible. Whether this improves and/or speeds the referee process remains to be seen. The point is that it is possible and involves little cost.
To date their work unambiguously, academics could adopt ``digital time stamps'' to reduce the debates over when ideas were developed and could even be a weapon against plagiarism. For discussions of some possibilities, see Haber and Storentta (1992) and PGP Digital Timestamping Service. However, the greatest deterrent to plagiarism is notoriety--online working paper archives with notification and search technologies provide the easiest means to greater notoriety, and hence the greatest deterrent to plagiarism. While some worry about plagiarism of their online papers, note that with current technology (scanners and OCR software), plagiarism from hard-copy works is quite easy today.