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Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers, Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King. Washington: Special Libraries Association, 2000. Pp. 488. Illustrations. Index. ISBN 0-87111-507-7.
Review by Robert Campbell
Although many pontificate on journal publishing, few understand it. Robert Maxwell did and became very wealthy as a result. I am still learning after thirty years in the trade, which is why I enjoyed this book so much. The irony here is that although the basic content of the huge range of academic journals is reports of primary research, there has been so little research carried out on the publishing process itself. This has become even more apparent in the recent literature on electronic publishing.
Tenopir and King are the exception. Over twenty-five years they have performed more than 100 studies that produced information and data that shed light on the roles played and the contribution made by scientists, publishers, and libraries to the scholarly journal system. The aim of their research and of this book has been to set the record straight, produce hard data rather than opinion, and analyse those data to give us some insight into the system and how it might evolve as it migrates from print on paper to the Web.
The book should appeal to any academic librarian or publisher. It will give them a much greater understanding of scholarly journals, how they work, and their economic basis. It also ought to be read by academic administrators, especially those who are responsible for library policy and budgets. They will learn that journals offer much better value than critics of the system claim and that a large part of an active researcher's time is devoted to writing and reading journal articles. When reading the book, I wondered how we who are involved in journal publishing might be able to get copies of it into the hands of senior librarians and their administrators. If they were to read the carefully drafted description and analysis of so much relevant and balanced research, perhaps they might revise their view of the journal and its value. We might then see the steady decline in library budgets as a percentage of institutional budgets check and possibly even start to rise. Those who argue that the...